Until now, many kinds of persuasive applications have been developed, and most of which
are used by individuals for personal benefits, example includes better healthcare, better
lifestyle and so on. However, one application area that is yet to be explored effectively is
persuading users for preserving shared resources including environmental conservation.
Unlike existing persuasive applications, these applications do not aim personal benefits and
consequently requires radically different persuasion techniques. In this paper, we apply
knowledge of cross-cultural understanding to this kind of persuasive applications. We
introduce five design strategies for persuasive applications that could be used especially in
collectivist cultures. These strategies are organizing group, anonymity, mutual surveillance,
development of mutual aid, and combine use of positive and negative feedback. By sharing
our experiences of building persuasive application for reducing CO2 emissions named
EcoIsland, we expose how these five design strategies could be applied in persuasive
applications. The application encourages users to do eco-friendly activities for reducing CO2
by offering game like feedback. The results of our experiment that recruited 6 families / 20
persons and took 4 weeks show that two design strategies, mutual surveillance and
combine use of positive and negative feedback worked effectively based on the number of
eco-friendly activities one participant in each household reports and questionnaires.