Design Home Energy Feedback: Understanding Home Contexts and Filling the Gaps

Transcription

1 2016 International Conference on Sustainable Energy, Environment and Information Engineering (SEEIE 2016) ISBN: Design Home Energy Feedback: Understanding Home Contexts and Gang REN 1,2 and Yan-cong SU 1,* 1 School of Digital Arts, Xiamen University of Technology, No.600 Ligong Road, Xiamen, , P.R.China 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK * Corresponding author Keywords: Energy feedback, Home context, Ambient display, Natural interaction. Abstract. Efficient home energy consumption is a complex, dynamic activity, and householders need to monitor, plan and act with the support of home energy feedback system. This paper reviews the existing literatures of home energy feedback system design, and summarizes the characteristics of home contexts from the householder s perspective, including low level of attention, motivation, effort, as well as short of knowledge and skills. We then analyze the gaps of using energy feedback system to support the users energy actives from perspective of data, information and user engagement, and we propose that using ambient display and natural interaction could improve the effectiveness of home energy feedback systems. Introduction Energy has emerged as one of the major challenges all over the world, and currently energy consumption and sustainability are gaining a lot of attention. Across all different energy consumption domains, domestic living contributes a very significant part, thus it is important to understand the domestic context to improve the energy efficiency at home. Many investigations of energy information and control system at home are trying to provide suggestions to improve energy conservation. Recent studies and technologies of domestic energy focused on providing consumption feedback to inform consumption and promote behavior change. Although some research indicated that energy information could help people to improve the energy conservations [1], many investigations [2, 7, 12, 19] showed that there is little evidence to suggest energy feedback or awareness of the cost of energy consumption will automatically achieve a significant reduction in energy demand or action changes, especially in long term. In this paper, we start by review the previous work about the existing home energy feedback technologies like smart meters, and analyze the home context for energy feedback system. We then summarize the gaps for users to apply such energy information system and suggest potential directions of effective design. Understanding the Home Context Residents need to consider many different things in their demotic life, including comfort [3, 9], (e.g. having thermostats set to most preferred temperature settings; having devices and lights on to maintain a comfortable and convenient setting), as well as safety, health, aesthetics, personalization, social expectations, self-image [3] and monetary factors [9]. As summarized in [8], many studies see the user energy behavior as reasons of environmental problems and therefore in need of change, and trying to let users know which aspects of their behavior are environmentally problematic and/or persuade them to change. Indeed, changing people s behavior to fit the energy saving may make sustainability manageable for engineers from technique perspectives, however, it may put technologies over people and their life rather than helping them to 244

2 High'Level' Low'Level' achieve a comfortable and ease domestic life, especially considering that there are many practices and routines at home that cannot be simply changed for energy saving [17]. However, it is dangerous for energy feedback designers to assume that the user could process and conduct the energy analysis, and willing to sacrifice their life quality and routine to achieve energy efficiency. To understand details of the home context of energy consumption and conservation, we analyze the characteristics of home context from the perspective of the user, as shown in Figure 1. Work' Home' A" en%on' Mo%va%on' Effort' Knowledge/skills' Figure 1. Difference between work and home context. Low Level of Attention Most energy feedback products often assume that the user is aware of the display and understand the information showed in the first place. This is not necessarily the case for interaction system at home, where people are regularly occupied by other activities rather than fully engaged in the display and information. However, many information systems, especially those built for office or professional usage, require the user s full attention and assume that a person interact with systems with a particular intent. However, in domestic settings, it is not always the suitable. Actually, designers cannot expect people keep their full attention and fully engaged with the energy information system or displays. Low Level of Motivation The energy monitors cannot encourage or motivate householders to reduce their levels of consumption and there are many possible reasons. For example, smart energy monitors or ambient displays may gradually become background within normal household routines and practices [12]; and once aware of their levels of electricity consumption, especially when the saving is minor, the household householders realize the limits to their energy saving and become less motivated [5, 13, 19]. Unwillingness or perceived inability to adopt various conservation practices is also reported [17]. There are also many examples of participants being resistant to changing their routines, in order to save energy and money [17, 19]. Low Level of Effort Except seeking information systems that are easy to understand, users also expect convenient control without too much effort. They like to have some simple devices that could to turn off all the lights in the house at once or to track what state all devices and appliances were in (on/off) would help them with being more electricity efficient [6]. Such one button cutting and saving control method was also recommended in [19], indicating that the user could be engaged in energy saving when the control requires less effort. To simplify their life and reduce workload, householders usually establish their own set of routines in different situations, so they can manage the distribution of action, interaction, and associated 245

3 technology in their house [16], and householders are also interested to have some devices that take care of their daily routines automatically [4]. Low Level of Knowledge and Skills Effective understanding and operating technology systems require not just the user s full attention, but professional knowledge and skills as well. This could be another barrier for interacting with energy system effectively at home as residents often have a less sophisticated level of understanding of domestic energy system and scientific energy units [22], and have limited time in which to make energy-related decisions [3]. Study on trends in living room [4] also suggests that people would like to have easier-to-understand manuals with pictures and personalized or contextualized support for technical device at home, and hope technique is not too complicated for many of the household members to use. For energy feedback applications, users also want to have graphical displays that synthesized the numerical information on the screen in a way that allowed them to analyze their energy use over time with a single glance [2]. Based on the limitations of the domestic context of effectively applying energy information system, we can also identify several gaps interfering the users to achieve energy efficiency at home. For example, Fisher et.al [10] suggested that the easiness of understanding is the essential feature of energy feedback, and the best cases normally include that multiple feedback options at the user s choice, an interactive element and detailed and appliances specific breakdown. In this section, we analyze two major gaps for delivering effective home energy feedback, and propose that we could use ambient display and national interaction to improve energy feedback design, as shown in Figure 2. From Data to Information Current domestic energy systems don t support information acquisition very well, e.g. the energy display may not be in the right place, or the energy information is displayed in a highly formalized, conventional way, and contains too much information in a single screen so difficult to use. Such systems normally require very high-level cognitive mechanisms from users to access and process. Essentially, the challenge here again is that people engage with their homes very differently from working in office [6]. On the other hand, ambient display could be a useful way to display information highly nonintrusive and distributed manner, and improve by design of energy feedback at home [11, 18]. The ambient display follows the concept of calm computing to create a pleasant user experience, and not to overburden the user with information [21]. For example, with four different types of ambient displays of different information capacity, notification level, representational fidelity and aesthetic emphasis [20], ambient displays could be an effective way to improve the feedback in different scenarios and contexts at home. Designers could also consider other factors while design ambient display, such as abstraction, and transitions [15]. From Information to Engagement As indicated by Fischer [10], the best cases of feedback to enhance energy efficiency normally include not just multiple feedback, but also interactive elements. And the natural and intuitive interaction with ambient visualization displays could be a promising method for improving users engagement with information [14]. Thanks to the development of wearable devices and ambient sensors, such natural interaction could be deployed at home at very low price currently, thus users could use speech, freehand gestures or their indoor locations to interact with the ambient displays and manage their domestic energy systems. For example, smart watches (e.g. Apple watch) and 3D sensors (e.g. Microsoft Kindest) can be used for pervasive gesture and speech detection, thus users can interact with the energy systems anywhere at home without being close to certain devices or locations. Such 246

4 Understanding Home Context convenient interaction may encourage users to interact more frequently with the energy feedback systems. Interac+on$ Low$level$of$ mo+va+on,$effort$ and$skills$ Natural$ Interac+on$ Informa+on$ Low$level$of$ a4 en+on$and$ knowledge.$$ Ambient$$ Displays$ Data$ User Energy feedback Figure 2. Gaps of home energy feedback. Conclusions We provide a brief literature review of domestic energy feedback research, and conduct an analysis about characteristics and gaps to apply energy feedback system at home. We also suggest the potential techniques of ambient displays and natural interaction to address the challenges of home energy feedback system. More detailed interaction design and user evaluations would be our future work. Acknowledgment This research was supported by the High-level Talents Projects of Xiamen University of Technology (No.YKJ14023R). The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers, which have improved this work. References [1] W. Abrahamse, L. Steg, C. Vlek, and T. Rothengatter. A review of intervention studies aimed at household energy conservation. Journal of environmental psychology, 25(3): , [2] D. Allen and K. Janda. The effects of household characteristics and energy use consciousness on the effectiveness of real-time energy use feedback: a pilot study. In Proceedings of the ACEEE summer study on energy efficiency in buildings, [3] L. Bartram, J. Rodgers, and K. Muise. Chasing the negawatt: visualization for sustainable living. Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE, 30(3):8--14, [4] R. Bernhaupt, M. Obrist, A. Weiss, E. Beck, and M. Tscheligi. Trends in the living room and beyond: results from ethnographic studies using creative and playful probing. Computers in Entertainment (CIE), 6(1):5, [5] M. Chetty, A. Brush, B. R. Meyers, and P. Johns. It's not easy being green: understanding home computer power management. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,

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