Hip to be square: designing serious apps for coolness

This paper discusses previous work in developing intervention apps for sustainability that are designed to be cool and improve user engagement. While much work has been carried out by the HCI community in sustainability, particularly energy consumption; little has been done to improve interaction with this relatively mundane but serious topic to engender a compelling and cooler experience. Using the theme of ‘it’s cool to be uncool’ for sustainability, we discuss the design of an eco-feedback Facebook application for deployment in a trial study. The Power Ballads Facebook app mashed mainstream ‘pop’ chart music with domestic energy data using aversive stimuli. Presented here are the pilot findings that suggest participants found the app cool

Power ballads: deploying aversive energy feedback in social media

This paper reports on the pilot evaluation of “Power Ballads”, an evocative social media application which displays aversive feedback based on excessive household energy usage. Work by other researchers in persuasive technologies has previously suggested the use of aversive feedback should be avoided as it leads to a lack of engagement by users. This work evaluates whether punishment of non-desirable behaviour discourages users from engaging with a persuasive application. To this end we recruited 9 households to use the Power Ballads application over a period of 4 weeks. We found the use of aversive feedback did not act as a deterrent to regularly interacting with the application through evaluating user engagement

Wattsup? Motivating reductions in domestic energy consumption using social networks

This paper reports on the design, deployment and evaluation of “Wattsup”, an innovative application which displays live autonomously logged data from the Wattson energy monitor, allowing users to compare domestic energy consumption on Facebook. Discussions and sketches from a workshop with Facebook users were used to develop a final design implemented using the Facebook API. Wattson energy monitors and the Wattsup app were deployed and trialled in eight homes over an eighteen day period in two conditions. In the first condition participants could only access their personal energy data, whilst in the second they could access each others’ data to make comparisons. A significant reduction in energy was observed in the socially enabled condition. Comments on discussion boards and semi-structured interviews with the participants indicated that the element of competition helped motivate energy savings. The paper argues that socially-mediated banter and competition made for a more enjoyable user experience

Using social network games to reduce energy consumption

This research is investigating the potential role of online social network based life simulation computer games as a persuasive tool for encouraging users to reduce their domestic energy consumption. Games such as ‘Farmville’ which runs on the Facebook platform have attracted millions of users worldwide who create simple virtual worlds where they interact with others and carry out everyday activities to earn tokens to spend within the game. Applying a User Centred Design (UCD) and in particular persona based design approach, this research is investigating why users find these games so enticing, the characteristics of those who play them, and the context in which they are played. Through an iterative UCD process, a life simulation game will be designed with users who represent a number of key ‘gamer personas’ in order to research how this sort of game could be used to encourage domestic energy saving behaviours

Hip to be Square: Designing Serious Apps for Coolness

Abstract This paper discusses previous work in developing intervention apps for sustainability that are designed to be cool and improve user engagement. While much work has been carried out by the HCI community in sustainability, particularly energy consumption; little has been done to improve interaction with this relatively mundane but serious topic to engender a compelling and cooler experience. Using the theme of 'it's cool to be uncool' for sustainability, we discuss the design of an eco-feedback Facebook application for deployment in a trial study. The Power Ballads Facebook app mashed mainstream 'pop' chart music with domestic energy data using aversive stimuli. Presented here are the pilot findings that suggest participants found the app cool

Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

Towards an Agent Based Framework for Modelling Smart Self-Sustainable Systems

Self-sustainability is a property of a system; a system is considered to be self-sustainable if it can sustain itself without external support in an observed period of time. If this property is mapped to a human settlement in context of resources (water, energy, food, etc.), it would describe a human settlement which is independent of external resources (like the national electrical grid or a central water distribution system), where such external resources are either not available, or not desirable. This article contributes to presenting the state-of-the-art overview of self-sustainability-related research. While self-sustainability as in the above described form was not a direct subject of research, there are several fields which are either related to, or could be of significant value to the self-sustainability research in this context. The extensive literature overview also showed no frameworks for modeling self sustainable systems in the context of human settlements. Herein a motivation for using agent-based modeling and simulation techniques will be given

Pre-installation challenges: classifying barriers to the introduction of smart home technology

Increasing technological developments indicate potential for a variety of improvements in the domestic environment. As part of an interdisciplinary research project, this study interviewed households prior to the installation of smart home technologies (SHTs) in order to identify critical issues at the pre-installation phase. Semi-structured interviews took place in 16 houses before the installation of SHTs, when a range of smart sensors and controls were presented to households for the first time. At this stage, they started to make key decisions about which devices to use, where to install, and how to position them. Participants mentioned diverse issues surrounding the introduction of SHTs. To guide the qualitative analysis, an organizing framework for research on smart homes and their users was used. This paper indicates that, even though participants appreciate the functional aspects of SHTs and the possibilities of a better living, their concerns related to technology (hardware & software), design (acceptability & usability) and spaces (home as complex places) are numerous. These results complement the existing literature (which focuses more on the use phase) with the perceived enablers and barriers prior to the installation of SHTs

Defining Context for Home Electricity Feedback Systems

Existing electricity feedback systems provide home occupants with real-time consumption data to enable them to control their consumption. However, these systems provide abstract consumption data that is not related to the occupants surrounding. Although there are some attempts to enrich consumption data with some context information, the presented feedback is not enough to inform decisions of how to conserve electricity. Therefore, this paper provides a rich definition of electricity consumption context, which can be used to provide sensible feedback to users. The obtained context elements can be categorized into three context types: User Context, Appliances Context, and Environment Context. Finally, different implications for the application of a context-aware feedback system are presented showing how the obtained context definition could be used to provide understandable feedback

Social networking sites as platforms to persuade behaviour change in domestic energy consumption

This MSc project addresses the following research question – “Can online social networks such as Facebook facilitate the motivation and behaviour change to reduce energy consumption in the home?” An investigation into the role of social interaction in social networks provides evidence to support the research question. The project undertook an extensive literature review and identified a gap in current knowledge regarding energy monitoring systems that are socially enabled. A participatory design workshop was then held to generate initial concept ideas and prototype interfaces. A final system using the Facebook application platform was designed and implemented by the author called Wattsup. An experimental design was then developed to evaluate the system which involved recruiting eight households for an eighteen day trial. This was supplemented with a qualitative study of comments generated by users and also in semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that the users of the Wattsup energy application integrated in Facebook assisted the participants in reducing their energy consumption. Types of energy information displayed in the application were both live and historical measurements as well as Co2 emissions, publicly viewable to participants and others on their personal Facebook friends list. Public viewing was implemented for comparison purposes as well as introducing peer pressure and competition amongst like-minded friends. Further analysis of the participant’s social interaction activity with the energy application revealed higher awareness of their energy usage behaviour was present. Positive effects of the results were lower energy costs and fewer Co2 emissions released upon the environment from the participants by using the socially enabled energy application. To test the theory of a positive effect of social interaction on domestic energy consumption, two Facebook energy applications were developed by the author. One of the applications contained socially enabled features, while the other displayed only the participant’s personal energy usage with no social features or capability to view other participant’s energy information