Energy gamification: the development of a user interface tool to upgrade social experience and energy literacy.

Abstract

Gamification consists in the application of typical elements of game-playing environments to other areas of activity. In different fields such as medicine, education, or business, gamification has been explored as an efficient vehicle to foster real-life predetermined targets or improve a real-life action effectiveness. Amidst the current energy transition, gamification is one of the available strategies to make the energy transition exciting to the end-user, proposed in recent times as a means of bridging information gaps, increasing learning, and motivating behaviour-change. The ultimate goal of using gamified solutions is not to influence the user to save energy with the goal of an extrinsic reward, however intangible, but to save energy because they have come to see it as intrinsically satisfying and meaningful. Leveraging in the increasing digitalization of the energy sector, gamified solutions can provide a useful user-engagement platform while fostering energy-consumption behavioural-change. Hence, in this context, the Smart2B H2020 project aims to present and analyse how can these gamified solutions create an excellent user-engagement experience while encouraging and fostering energy literacy and behaviour-change. The developed gamified module will comprise a user interface (UI) tool where a healthy competition between users will take shape – driven mainly by the user’s energy consumption behavioural change – and the monthly and overall leader boards will translate the energy savings achieved by the users into an in-game virtual point-based system. Other gamified elements and mechanisms such as missions, interactive tasks or challenges, instant feedback or achievements, and badges will further progressively guide the user through their energy consumption patterns and how they can be improved. A social engineering and educational perspective, brought possible within the context of the pilot sites in Smart2B’s project, will focus on the maximization of user interaction and engagement and how can these gamified solutions motivate real behaviour-change.