“This Is the App You Need to Download for Earth Day”
…reads the April 21, 2015 story headline in TIME magazine digital issue.
MyEarth tracks personal carbon footprints, energy use and savings, and is available for free on iTunes. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation with support from the UW-Madison Office of Sustainability, the MyEarth app is poised to make a measurable impact.
Professor Wong‘s expertise in consumer behavior was an essential perspective for the project to succeed. Technology in and of itself is not enough to change or effect a behavior, in this case, an individual’s energy consumption. Noted in the story on UW-Madison’s home page, “Drawing on parallels between food consumption and energy use, Wong’s team designed “My Earth” with approaches used in food-tracking apps that help users catalog their daily eating habits.
“We tried to categorize it into the different kinds of activities that you can do so that people can select from whatever suits their lifestyle,” Wong says.