The team, composed of programmers, behavioral analysts and environmental engineers, has created stepgreen, a website to track individual actions related to energy usage. To reach a large number of users and increase awareness about the mission of stepgreen, the developers have created applications for myspace and facebook profiles. Users of stepgreen who have a profile on myspace and/or facebook can then add a stepgreen application to their personal profile.
My work this summer will be to extend the available stepgreen applications to include a google gadget to display stepgreen on iGoogle. My main research will be in the area of Information Visualization. On stepgreen, a user can see a graph representing the amount of money and energy saved by the reported actions. This graph needs to be studied to display data the most coherently for the user. For example, the functionality of the graph could be extended to compare users from different geographic locations. In addition, I will program a new visualization for the website.
Check out my journal to see my progress!