GreenCompass: Weaving Playful Nature Engagement into Urban Micro-Moments through Context-Aware Gamification

Paper Title

GreenCompass: Weaving Playful Nature Engagement into Urban Micro-Moments through Context-Aware Gamification

Publication Info

• Topic area: Technology-mediated nature engagement in urban environments
• Keywords: Nature engagement, urban living, gamification, context-aware systems, human-nature interaction, well-being, social connectedness, adaptive tasks, mobile applications, outdoor activities

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Urbanization has distanced people from nature, negatively impacting mental and physical health. Existing human-nature interaction (HNI) technologies often assume users are already in nature-rich settings or have planned visits, offering limited mechanisms to embed nature engagement into fragmented urban routines.
• Significance: Addressing this gap can improve well-being, reduce stress, and foster environmental awareness among urban residents, making nature engagement more accessible and sustainable.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored frameworks and tools for nature engagement, including gamification, social features, and context-aware systems. However, these approaches often lack mechanisms to integrate brief, repeatable nature encounters into daily urban life. This paper builds on these foundations to design a system that embeds nature engagement into urban micro-moments.

Solution

• Proposed approach: GreenCompass, a mobile application that uses context-aware scheduling, gamification, and adaptive tasks to recommend and facilitate nearby nature engagement opportunities.
• Novelty:
  1. Integration of context-aware scheduling to identify micro-moments for nature engagement.
  2. Gamified and social features to motivate sustained participation and collective accountability.
  3. Adaptive task design tailored to users’ physical abilities and preferences, ensuring inclusivity.
  4. Empirical evaluation of the system’s impact on nature relatedness, well-being, and social connectedness.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Context-aware scheduling identifies short time windows and nearby green spaces for nature tasks.
  • Gamification elements (e.g., quests, feedback, progress bars, social sharing) motivate engagement without relying on extrinsic rewards.
  • Adaptive task recommendations evolve based on user preferences, physical capabilities, and engagement history.
  • Social features include collaborative tasks, shared progress tracking, and asynchronous photo sharing to foster group interaction.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Significant improvements in nature relatedness (from 2.53 to 4.10 on a 5-point scale), outdoor activity (frequency increased from 5.80 to 9.25 times per week; duration increased from 4.78 to 8.70 hours per week), well-being (from 2.51 to 3.69 on a 6-point scale), and perceived stress reduction (from 2.65 to 2.26 on a 5-point scale).
  • Social connectedness increased from 4.74 to 5.26 on a 6-point scale in the experimental group.
  • System usability rated highly (SUS score: 83.5, above the benchmark of 68).
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The experimental group outperformed the reminder-based baseline in all measured dimensions, including nature relatedness, outdoor activity, well-being, and social connectedness.
  • Effects emerged by Week 2 and consolidated by Week 4, while the baseline group showed no significant changes.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Four-week field study with 40 urban participants (20 experimental, 20 baseline), using surveys (e.g., Nature Relatedness Scale, WHO-5 Well-being Index) and semi-structured interviews.
  • Mixed-methods analysis combining quantitative measures (ANOVA, Wilcoxon tests) and qualitative thematic analysis.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Study duration (four weeks) may not capture long-term behavior changes.
  • Participant pool (young urban residents) limits generalizability; future studies should include diverse demographics.
  • Self-reported measures may introduce bias; future work could incorporate passive sensing.
  • Modular experimental designs could disentangle the effects of individual system features.
  • Seasonal variations may influence engagement; future studies should explore different seasons.

Summary

GreenCompass is a mobile application designed to integrate nature engagement into urban residents’ daily routines through context-aware scheduling, gamification, and adaptive tasks. A four-week field study demonstrated significant improvements in nature relatedness, outdoor activity, well-being, and social connectedness compared to a reminder-based baseline. The system’s usability was rated highly, and qualitative findings highlighted the importance of personalization, social interaction, and task diversity in fostering sustained engagement. While limitations include the short study duration and participant demographics, the results suggest that GreenCompass effectively bridges the urban-nature divide and offers actionable design strategies for future nature engagement technologies.