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EnergyHome: leveraging housemate dynamics to motivate energy conservation

Published: 04 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We designed, implemented, and evaluated an iOS mobile application called EnergyHome to investigate how social interaction among housemates is related to their engagement in energy-saving practices. EnergyHome enables housemates to track personal energy-saving activities and to collaborate on saving energy together. Fourteen pairs of housemates used EnergyHome for a week. Afterwards, we interviewed each participant about their use of the app. All interviews were transcribed and analyzed using an iterative comparative approach. We identified two types of social dynamics in the way housemates used the app. In complementary dynamics, one housemate took the initiative to set energy-saving challenges and the other(s) followed. In symmetrical dynamics, housemates collectively set energy-saving challenges but no one tried to exert control. Based on these findings, we discuss design strategies to motivate energy conservation that take into account different social dynamics among housemates.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobileHCI '17: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
    September 2017
    874 pages
    ISBN:9781450350754
    DOI:10.1145/3098279
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 September 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. household energy conservation
    2. housemates
    3. mobile design
    4. social dynamics
    5. user experience

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