Energy Savings by User Interaction and Visualisation

Information technology tools for energy management have, to date, failed to take advantage of the recent advances in human-computer interaction. In fact, considerable expertise is still required to interpret and manage energy data. Other domains, in contrast, including architecture, engineering and construction, have embraced new interaction paradigms aiming at more natural ways to interact with and analyse data. We foresee that integrating natural user interfaces with virtual and augmented reality environments in an energy management system will provide a powerful tool, enabling unskilled users to perform complex energy management activities.

Engaging the public to decrease their carbon footprint via energy feedback has become a significant topic of both study and practice and understanding how to best leverage technology for this purpose is an ideal question for the field of HCI to address. One common example is Home Energy Reports (HERs) and Business energy reports (BERs), which are paper or electronic reports that display a consumer's energy use alongside various benchmarks and " tips " to help (and persuade) them to save energy. While HERs and BERs show great promise, average savings hover around 1–3% with the potential savings in the average home and/or business closer to 15–20%, leaving potential room for improvement. This paper presents a mixed-methods research framework that is being used to improve BER user experience and energy savings. It blends inductive research methods from the fields of design and HCI with deductive methods drawn from psychology and behavioral economics to develop and test hypotheses and translate findings into real-world application. After introducing the framework, a case study is presented in which these steps are followed over two years of research with one BER product across multiple utility pilots. Implications for both energy feedback specifically as well as suggestions on how this framework can be applied across the broader field of usability are discussed.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2013

This paper describes a novel art-inspired tangible eco-feedback system. The concept emerged from a workshop with researchers, designers and artists looking at innovative ways to provide more effective eco-feedback that engages users emotionally. The tangible aspect of the system is composed of a set of magnets that users can stick on their physical mailbox outside of their apartment building according to their average energy consumption. The magnets are a total of seven pieces, one for each day of the week. Each piece has a variation of three colors, from green (low consumption) to burning red (high consumption). The magnets are to be displayed in a sequence that represents a typical panorama of local nature. In this paper we report the design and the study we conducted to gauge preliminary results on the system usage and potential. Interviews with participants revealed that none of them felt uncomfortable having their consumption displayed outside. When children were involved in the process they "took control" of the task and pressured their families to perform better.

—This paper strives to assemble consumers and providers of energy in a web platform. The goal is to highlight energy consumption of each user to push them to decrease their consumption. All the work is concentrated on a main concept key: to motivate population modify and optimize their habits concerning energy consumption. It is achieved by a web interface in which user is connected to energy concept and can see his consumptions in the living space that he occupies. ThinkEE will offer its users the possibility of acting on their living spaces, reacting about their energy-related behaviors and finally interacting with other occupants in order to create a community caring about the energy and its impact on the environment.

Building Research & Information

Building management systems are designed for energy managers; there are few energy-feedback systems designed to engage staff. A tool, known as e-Genie, was created with the purpose of engaging workplace occupants with energy data and supporting them to take action to reduce energy use. Building on research insights within the field, e-Genie's novel approach encourages users to make plans to meet energy-saving goals, supports discussion and considers social energy behaviours (e.g. discussing energy issues, taking part in campaigns) as well as individual actions. A field-based study of e-Genie indicated that visualizations of energy data were engaging and that the discussion 'Pinboard' was particularly popular. Pre-and post-survey (N = 77) evaluation of users indicated that people were significantly more concerned about energy issues and reported engaging more in social energy behaviour after about two weeks of e-Genie being installed. Concurrently, objective measures of electricity use decreased over the same period, and continued decreasing over subsequent weeks. Indications are that occupant-facing energyfeedback visualizations can be successful in reducing energy use in the workplace; furthermore, supporting social energy behaviour in the workplace is likely to be a useful direction for promoting action.

Domestic electricity consumption accounts for up to one third of a country's yearly energy consumption. Home automation and energy feedback are likely to impact energy efficiency by: informing the energy consumers about their current energy consumption; suggesting more energy efficient behaviours; and actively changing/ modifying user actions automatically or manually for reducing energy wastage. However, the design criteria for designing effective visualisation of the household energy consumption remain unclear. It is likely that the design criteria would be more effective the requirements are provided by the energy consumers themselves. Hence, a user-centred survey is designed to identify and understand both the functional and nonfunctional design requirements which would help in developing an effective, easy-to-understand visualization which would be more likely to be used and promote behavioural changes.

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2020

Addressing efficient management of energy has become a central objective due to the scarcity of traditional energy sources and global warming. To cope with this overarching issue, some technological solutions such as Smart Grids, Internet of Things or Demand response are proposed. However, the majority of them overlooks the role of human beings in the equation. Moreover, the very nascent body of research combining human and machine intelligence proposes methods, frameworks, and guidelines which vary depending on the application scenario complicating the selection of gold-standards to ensure seamless cooperation between smart devices and people. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to provide a set of design-hypotheses to devise augmented objects that ally with their users to reduce energy consumption. We expect designers, engineers, makers or even hobbyists in the intersection between technology-enablers (through IoT) and behavioural scientists to benefit from them. To this aim, we describe the results of a long-term study in office-based workplaces, where participants were randomly assigned to different experimental conditions (persuasion, dashboard, and automation) to increase their energy-efficient behaviour. Grounded Theory analysis was applied over qualitative data collected during focus group sessions obtaining five themes around a central category. The resulting themes were linked to design-hypotheses for IoT devices which were then tested through the implementation of a new IoT object also conceived for the workplace.

Energy Procedia, 2015

We evaluate the changes to domestic electricity and gas consumption when the occupants have local access to a coloured real time in-home display (IHD). We report the preliminary six months findings of a three year research project involving 52 new build Scottish dwellings (flats and houses). On average, when compared to households with no IHD (n=22) the households with the IHD (n=30) reduced their gas and electricity consumption by 20% and 7% respectively. We found that the IHD was valued by the users for its ability to incite behaviour to reduce gas consumption and reinforce existing electricity saving behaviour.

2017

The electrical grid must always be supplied with as much electricity as is taken from it. However, the greater the share of fluctuating renewable energy sources, the more difficult it becomes to manage power supply. In order to help, interactive systems have been designed to encourage users in using renewable energy when there is plenty of it rather than when there is little (i.e. shifting energy supply). Most of these systems use ambient interfaces to represent forecast information on the availability of renewable energy. Yet, it is unclear which ambient interfaces are more effective in enhancing ambient awareness and maintaining new practices for shifting energy supply. We think that parameters such as perceptible artefacts (e.g., shape-changing, color-changing) influence the effectiveness of ambient interfaces. To answer this concern, we study shifting energy supply with laptops in the workplace. Because practices for shifting energy supply with laptops have yet to be identified,...

Targeting reductions of electricity usage among consumers in their homes has been very popular among researchers, industry, and research funding organizations. Here we look behind the application surface to examine where visual energy-savings applications might have their greatest impact. We analyze residential, commercial, and industrial sectors in the US and observe differences regarding energy use, economic incentives, and leverage per establishment. We then give examples of industrial and commercial energy-savings applications being developed at Mitsubishi Electric and supported by its North American Research Laboratory, MERL.