Leveraging facebook’s open graph to develop an environmental persuasive application

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Social networking sites persuade millions of users each day to adopt specific behaviors. Using the persuasive principles inherent to these sites to increase environmental awareness and reduce our ecological footprint can be challenging but certainly worthy. The DEAP project has already invested time and resources to address persuasion through different devices for a broad audience. However, there are still many obstacles when it comes to such a delicate subject as people’s routines. For many years, social factors have prevented people from adopting a way of living friendlier to our Environment. Whether it is due to lack of proper knowledge about this topic or simply because they are not willing to change, the truth is that we are eventually reaching a point where it will be too late to keep our planet as we know it. Consequently, the time has arrived when there is great need for a platform to bring existing efforts together no matter where they come from but the goal they share: change incorrect behaviors towards environmental sustainability. Towards this ambitious goal a board game was developed and integrated in Facebook capable of merging third-party applications and an important and valuable basis for future research in the field of persuasion.