Exploring non-pragmatic visualizations for a residential water conservation game

Residential water conservation is an ongoing challenge in which eco-feedback techniques can play a significant role. To promote water conservation among residents, especially children, we propose an engaging and informative approach that combines pragmatic and non-pragmatic visualizations, with gamification techniques. We target school-age children because they are beginning to learn about water conservation at school, and they have the influence on their parents at home. To explore the effectiveness of this approach, we conducted two user studies. We conclude that the non-pragmatic visualization is a promising approach in affecting users’ water conservation attitudes. Combining both pragmatic and non-pragmatic visualizations can bring more possibilities to the eco-feedback design. Also, the gamification strategies prove to be effective in motivating water-wise actions and promoting learning. Moreover, we also extract the insight for future design, including the aspects of aesthetic attributes of visualizations, the ambience requirement, and collaborative decision making.