Page - 163 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

West Foods Limited offers traceability as one form of engagement related to ethical consumption, whereby consumers can input information recorded on food products to the company website [7]; still, it is hard to say that this is directly linked with acts of ethical consumption. In the environment as described above, we hypothesize that consumers have no opportunity to be aware of ethical consumption in their purchasing behavior. To motivate ethical consumption, there are important elements: one is for consumers to be aware of ethical consumption when they are actually in a commercial establishment, and the other is for consumers to understand ethical consumption within their daily life, with consumers able to derive benefit from their understanding. In consideration of the above points, the purpose of this study was to develop a practical and useful system comprising a dongle interface, blockchain, and mobile application, and to test motivating ethical consumption using this assembled system at an actual commercial establishment. 2. Implementation We propose a system with two functions. The first is the conjoining of a dongle interface and mobile application as the means for making an appeal to consumers to engage in ethical consumption. This means that consumers will, in an easy and natural way, deepen their knowledge of ethical consumption; further, a record will be kept of consumers’ ethical consumption. Simply by inserting the dongle interface into a smartphone, the consumer can watch a related video, and, by inserting a different dongle, the consumer can receive tokens which prove ethical consumption. This will enable lowering the threshold for economic activity vis-a-vis ethical merchandise. The second function is as follows. As consumers can see tokens they have received, they can confirm a historical record of their consumption activity. Then, by using a blockchain, a third party can confirm this consumption activity, enabling future applications that could benefit the consumer, such as receiving discounts from ethical- consumption related campaigns. We developed a headphone-jack dongle [8] that is linked with Mode.TOKYO [9][10], an application for smartphones that allows a consumer to make calculations equivalent to coupon usage. We further developed a system whereby coupons acquired with the application can be used at different commercial establishments using the blockchain Broof [11][12]. Figure 1 shows a conceptual diagram of the system. By inserting the dongle interface into their smartphone, consumers can utilize content (video, images, etc.) from service providers. Information on provided content that is consumed (for example, the time taken to review a video) is recorded to Broof. Broof then issues a token linked to the consumed content and distributes this to the user. Depending on the color of the distributed token, users can confirm their consumption behavior trends. Our hypothesis was that, with visualization of their consumption trends, users will spontaneously perform actions with an awareness of their (moral, ethical, etc.) values, thereby motivating ethical behavior. J.Suzuki etal. / System forMotivatingEthicalConsumptionBehavior 163