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In recent years, interaction designers have actively started addressing sustainability as a research topic. More specifically, persuasive applications, which aim at promoting pro-environmental behaviour, such as energy saving have been of growing interest in multiple research disciplines. Driven by the proliferation of smart meters and energy monitors as well as the rise of social media, researchers and designers of persuasive applications have developed a wide range of design solutions that address this issue. The majority of them, however, provide the same information to users irrespective of differences in their environmental concerns and different motivations to conserve energy. Our research addresses this gap. We design mock-up screens that provide feedback catering towards different pro-environmental values and concerns and ask users to evaluate them in a survey setting. The research aims at understanding what feedback different people find relevant and therefore attempts to bridge the gap between environmental psychology and HCI. At the same time it provides insights for the design of personalised eco-feedback related to energy consumption.

Social connectedness is an indicator of the extent to which people can realize various network benefits and is therefore a source of social capital. Using the case of Twitter, a theoretical model of social connectedness based on the functional and structural characteristics of people's communication behavior within an online social network is developed and tested. The study investigates how social presence, social awareness, and social connectedness influence each other, and when and for whom the effects of social presence and social awareness are most strongly related to positive outcomes in social connectedness. Specifically, the study looks at the concurrent direct and moderating effect of two structural constructs characterizing people's online social network: network size and frequency of usage. The research model is tested using data (n = 121) collected from two sources: (a) an online survey of Twitter users and (b) their usage data collected directly from Twitter. Results indicate that social awareness, social presence, and usage frequency have a direct effect on social connectedness, whereas network size has a moderating effect. Social presence is found to partially mediate the relationship between social awareness and social connectedness. The findings of the analysis are used to outline design implications for online social networks from a human-computer interaction perspective.

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Globally distributed software engineering involves one or more of geographic, temporal or cultural distances, which empirical studies find have deleterious effects on the efficiency of the software engineering process. There have been some successful examples where one 'bridge' location has facilitated collaboration and coordination across the other locations. Managers might want to use this bridging as a tactic for future projects, even when future collaborations may be composed of very different participants and in different locations and contexts than current successfully bridged teams. However, group behaviour is complicated and establishing an effective bridge is neither a simple nor a straightforward step. We propose a set of guidelines, based on empirical findings, to help managers understand what to expect from the bridging tactic. These include cultural, organizational, individual and temporal factors as well as insights into the costs and benefits of bridging.