Carbon Footprint Calculation & Environmental Literacy
During my PhD, I had the chance to collaborate with Gege Gao, who was a fellow informatics student at the time, and Prof. Patrick Shih to investigate how well people currently understood reports of carbon footprint measurements. We then designed a carbon footprint calculator and had participants test the new application and collected their feedback on how they perceived their results as well as the change in their environmental literacy. Presenting results as the number of trees it would take to process the carbon in a a year compared to pounds or tons of a gas was perceived as much easier to understand. All images presented here were created by Jacob Abbott and Gege Gao.
Above are photographs of the initial paper prototype cards used in eliciting ideas and some redesigns used in walkthroughs below.
Above are screenshots of initial welcome and account creation screens for the initial demo application and below are the redesigned application which was used in a week long field deployment.
Creen: A Carbon Footprint Calculator Designed for Calculation in Context
Jacob Abbott, Gege Gao, Patrick Shih. In International Conference on Information (iConf), pp. 769-776. Springer, March 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_72
All photography provided by Jacob E. Abbott