Last week New Scientist reported that US emissions could be cut by more than 7 per cent if people changed their ways at home. Separate studies in US, Dutch and British homes have reported that 26 to 36 per cent of domestic energy use is "behavioural" – determined by the way we use machines, not the efficiency of the hardware itself.
This means that "machines designed to change humans", as the persuasive technology group of Stanford University, California, calls them, could save us huge amounts of energy and money.
Energy awareness
Many projects are trying to make that happen, with two main motivations. One is to understand which facets of human nature can be manipulated to change behaviour. The other is to develop technical strategies to do so.
Cached
