The SWICE Project
Sustainable Well-being for the Individual and the Collectivity in the Energy transition
SWICE is a research project sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s SWEET programme (Call 1-2021 “Living and Working) and coordinated by the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). SWEET – “SWiss Energy research for the Energy Transition” – is a funding programme of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) whose purpose is to accelerate innovations that are key to implementing Switzerland’s Energy Strategy 2050 and achieving the country’s climate goals.
In the context of the SWICE consortium, a team of the Human-IST Institute, developed an infrastructure for the collection of people's personal behavioral data related to sustainability along 4 main dimensions:
- Housing and energy use: This dimension encapsulates the consumption of resources used to sustain the individual’s comfort in the buildings where they spend most of their time. In some cases, only the person’s home is considered, as it is the building where they have the most control on the various parameters. However, one can easily argue that also a person’s workplace is to be considered, as it is a location where most people spend a fair amount of time during the day. Indicators in this category include energy consumption for lighting and heating/cooling, as well as water usage.
- Mobility: This area of consumption includes the behaviour of people with respect to their mobility, including both everyday mobility patterns, commuting, as well as free-time mobility, for example for weekend activities and holidays. Indicators in this category include the choice of modes of transport and the covered distance.
- Food: Another major dimension impacting one person’s carbon footprint regards their food consumption. For example, it has been estimated that the 14.5% of all human-induced greenhouse gases emissions is caused by livestock supply chains (Gerber et al., 2013). For this reason, people’s food related behaviour is considered as one of the principal dimensions for the estimation of their general environmental behaviour. Indicators belonging to this category include people’s dietary behaviour in terms of food choice, preparation, and consumptions.
- Consumption of goods and services: This dimension encompasses the acquisition and utilization of products and services in daily life. It plays a crucial role in shaping an individual's environmental impact as it involves the entire life cycle of goods, from production to disposal. This category includes for example details about buying and recycling items such as clothes and footwear, but also on people’s choices in terms of recreation.
- Experimenter's interface: This interface allows any experimenter to create their own data collection campaigns to which participants can register and retrieve the collected data. This includes creating various types of surveys and accessing data from building sensors, as well as the anonymized mobility patterns of participants.
- Survey on environmentally relevant behaviour, drivers, and spillovers: A survey was created to track people’s sustainable behaviors, what drives them, how they change, and whether the behavior in one dimension spills over into another one. It looks at different types of actions (like saving energy, eating less meat, or supporting policies) across areas like housing, transport, food, and daily life. It also asks about lifestyle preferences, wellbeing (health, autonomy, participation), and psychological factors such as norms and values.
- Mobile application: A mobile app was developed to serve as a unique point of contact between experimenters and participants. This makes it easy for participants to join campaigns and share data anonymously. It collects both passive data (like physical activity - steps - and mobility from phone sensors) and survey responses on participants' behavior in other dimensions. Additionally, the application allows an anonymous communication between experimenters and participants and, unlike commercial solutions, handles all the user data in a privacy-by-design fashion. More information about this under SWICE Mobile App
- Building sensors database: To automate the data collection about the "Housing and Energy use" dimension, a cooperation of the SWICE consortium with Living Labs across Switzerland provides access to the data produced by specific buildings. In controlled settings, this data can be linked anonymously to individuals or groups (e.g., in shared office spaces). This provides quantitative insights into how people use buildings, helping to complete the picture of sustainable behaviors in different contexts.