A Methodological Framework to Assess Individual Sustainable Behavior

Cities are privileged places in which the transition of society towards a sustainable future could be achieved. In this direction, individuals could have a preeminent impact in the attempt to meet such target. To engage individuals in the more responsible use of resources, more sustainable behavior and environmental identity within citizens has to be promoted. To support the transition of citizens behavioral patterns toward a more sustainable use of resources, several tools have been proposed, especially in the Human-Computer Interaction field. Such tools are rarely used more than once by users, thus usually they fail in promoting a stable engagement of the user, and their efficacy in fostering a change in her environmental behavior is limited. In this paper a methodology to design a gamifyied environment is presented, taking into consideration the possibility to integrate different parameters to promote user’s participation and to foster her perseverance in the engagement with the proposed serious game. A specific Sustainability Index is proposed, together with its calculation algorithm, in order to better communicate and compare the environmental performances of individuals, and ultimately to interact among each other through collaboration and competition in the framework of the proposed game itself.