Beyond Eco-feedback - Using Art and Emotional Attachment to Express Energy Consumption

This paper describes several art based eco-feedback concepts conceived around the potential of emotional attachment between people and the natural environment. Starting from a sensor-infrastructure that looks at how families consume electricity in their homes, we investigate several artistic visualizations of the Madeiran local landscapes exploring the connection between families and elements of the endemic laurel forest. The approach described here leverages digital art as a means to go beyond traditional eco-feedback technology. By coupling people and the forest landscapes we intend to narrow the physical, temporal and psychological gaps between our everyday actions and nature. We explore how people can build a direct emotional connection between their daily energy consumption and the impact on the natural environment (such as climate change and related forest fires, mudslides, desertification and erosion).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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

Developing an Online Social Media System to Influence Pro-environmental Behaviour based on User Values

Reducing our carbon footprint is an urgent global issue. A number of persuasive technologies have been developed with the aim of reducing energy demand by influencing energy consumption behaviour. We refer to energy consumption behaviour as any way which an individual acts that directly or indirectly has consequences on their or others' carbon footprint. Systems that influence a change in behaviour are “computerized software or information systems designed to reinforce, change or shape attitudes or behaviours or both without using coercion or deception”. Despite promising results, important drivers underpinning energy use are rarely taken into account during the system design. This paper presents research on social-media systems that investigates how such systems might influences users' energy consumption behaviour based on an understanding of people's values, everyday life and their decision-making

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

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

This paper describes a pilot investigation into the use of the social networking site Facebook as a platform for persuasive applications. The application domain is behaviour change in domestic energy consumption and the study focuses on determining peoples’ attitudes towards the hypothetical coupling of the consumer product Wattson, which can monitor domestic electricity usage, to a Facebook application termed Watts Up. The Facebook application presents visualisations of users’ own electricity consumption as well as that of their friends. Users’ attitudes towards this notion were accumulated and analysed using grounded theory. Some user indications revealed negative opinions about the concept based, for instance, around privacy and confusion; however the balance of opinion appeared to favour the underlying idea that revealing other people’s energy usage data would lead to competition and peer influence to reduce energy consumption

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