Smart environments can engage a wide range of end users with different interests and priorities, from corporate managers looking to improve the performance of their business to school children who want to explore and learn more about the world around them. Creating an effective user experience within a smart environment (from smart buildings to smart cities) is an important factor to success. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing Internet-of-Things-enabled applications within a smart home, school, office building, university, and airport, where the goal has been to engage a wide range of users (from building managers to business travellers) to increase water and energy awareness, management, and conservation.Driven by the idea of using ICT to more effectively and efficiently manage resources, smart environments have emerged in the form of smart cities, smart buildings, smart grids, smart water, and smart mobility. 1 Mark Weiser and colleagues define a smart environment as "a physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives, and connected through a continuous network." 2 A key driver in the development of smart environments is the convergence of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, which are driving the
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