'A bit like British Weather, I suppose'

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of the Temperature Calendar -a visualization of temperature variation within a workplace over the course of the past week. This highlights deviation from organizational temperature policy, and aims to bring staff "into the loop" of understanding and managing heating, and so reduce energy waste. The display was deployed for three weeks in five public libraries. Analysis of interaction logs, questionnaires and interviews shows that staff used the displays to understand heating in their buildings, and took action reflecting this new understanding. Bringing together our results, we discuss design implications for workplace displays, and an analysis of carbon emissions generated in constructing and operating our design. More in general, the findings helped us to reflect on the role of policy on energy consumption, and the potential for the HCI community to engage with its application, as well as its definition or modification.

Co-Designing a Device for Behaviour-Based Energy Reduction in a Large Organisation

“…Unfortunately, there appears to be very little literature investigating or evidencing how this can be achieved in practice. A handful of recent studies are notable for adopting participatory design and user-focused approaches to intervention design in the workplace [8,11,13,25]. However, these studies tend to be limited in one or more of the following areas: their investigation of the organisational context; the extent to which users are involved in the design process; and their ability to report quantitative evaluations of the intervention's impact on energy consumption (especially long-term).…”

Washing with the Wind

“…Most work in this area looks at the different design challenges surrounding materialising invisible and intangible energy resources and tailoring feedback on the consumption of these [47]. In order to achieve this, designers and researchers have visualised past and forecasted consumption data on mobiles [38,59] or insitu displays of electricity [45,58,62,67], heating [16], water [22,46], and food [15,74]. Others have also explored ambience and art [24,56], lighting [33,34], and physical materials [9,36,68] as feedback techniques.…”

“…Some through the design of eco-forecasts [37,49,54,58,62], while others have engaged with designing interactions that are directed towards specific energy consuming appliances, e.g. washing machines [8,17], electrical vehicles [7,10], and heating appliances [14,16,31].…”

Assisted Shifting of Electricity Use

“…Designs for both informing and assisting householders and workplaces to conserve heat have also been studied within sustainable HCI. An example of informing users to conserve heat through design is Constanza et al's [16] three-week workplace study of regulating heating by giving feedback on temperatures rather than the actual energy consumption. Their results showed that information visualizations can get people engaged with existing heating patterns through reflection.…”

“…Firstly, little attention has been placed on how people use and experience these technologies in residential and everyday life [31,52,68]. Secondly, only a few user studies [10,14,16] report on how shifting, and in particular assisted shifting, is experienced in a real-life setting long-term. Hence, as a community we need more insights into how households experience smart grid technology assisting them to shift consumption in real-life settings, so we are better equipped to shape the interaction design for these scenarios in the future [62].…”