Team Members
Spencer Harbo, Adam Nault
Partner
Victoria Bellotti
Adviser
Raymond De Young
Project Summary
Overconsumption of the Earth’s natural resources is causing widespread environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change. Future environmental sustainability may be fundamentally dependent on our ability to reduce current levels of consumption. One way to implement this much-needed societal change is by motivating individual and community participation in place-based resource sharing.
The success of place-based resource sharing may be dependent on our understanding of the needs of communities, including what motivates individuals to share resources, as well as the barriers to engaging in sharing. Currently, our team is coordinating a project through the Dow Master’s Fellowship to answer these questions within the context of Southeastern Michigan. Through interviews with leaders of sharing organizations and a survey of community members in four comparison communities, this ongoing project aims to capture motivations for sharing in order to help improve local sharing economies through a well-informed social marketing and urban design strategy.
The proposed project will build off of our ongoing work in two distinct ways: 1) in collaboration with the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), we will develop a cross-sectional qualitative assessment to better understand motivations for participating in local sharing economies among communities in the United States and abroad; and 2) we will provide consultation and support to computer-human interaction designers at PARC, Penn State University, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and leaders in the hOurworld timebanking network to improve the predictive functionality of a ‘smart’ mobile TimeBanking application currently under development, which will draw on our motivational interview findings to match community members with one another and encourage the sharing of resources and services.