skip to main content
10.1145/3369457.3369501acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesozchiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Where Are They Now?: Revisiting Energy Use Feedback a Decade After Deployment

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In home displays (IHD's) of energy use offers potential to engage households with energy use and improve energy literacy. Yet explorations of use over longer time periods are lacking. Based on qualitative in-home interviews with 19 participants, this research provides accounts from owners of IHD's up to 10 years after their initial deployment. Findings indicate the near complete abandonment of the devices and participants' reflections exemplify the short-lived value provided by simple cent-a-meter IHD's. The paper reflects on IHD's as a component of broadscale energy literacy programs, closing with suggestions for how designers might re-frame energy engagement as a service.

References

[1]
Mahmoud A. Alahmad, Patrick G. Wheeler, Avery Schwer, Joshua Eiden, and Adam Brumbaugh. 2012. A comparative study of three feedback devices for residential real-time energy monitoring. IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron. 59, 4 (2012), 2002--2013.
[2]
BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL. 2010. BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL ANNUAL REPORT 2009-10. Brisbane, Australia. Retrieved from https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/NewsPublications_Council_Annual_Report_2009-2010_Full_Document.pdf
[3]
Kathryn Buchanan, Riccardo Russo, and Ben Anderson. 2014. Feeding back about eco-feedback: How do consumers use and respond to energy monitors? Energy Policy 73, (2014), 138--146.
[4]
Kathryn Buchanan, Riccardo Russo, and Ben Anderson. 2015. The question of energy reduction: The problem(s) with feedback. Energy Policy 77, (2015), 89--96.
[5]
K. Carrie Armel, Abhay Gupta, Gireesh Shrimali, and Adrian Albert. 2013. Is disaggregation the holy grail of energy efficiency? The case of electricity. Energy Policy 52, (2013), 213--234.
[6]
Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy. 2018. Smart metering implementation program: Progress Report for 2018. London, UK. Retrieved from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/767128/smart-meter-progress-report-2018.pdf
[7]
D.A. Epstein, M. Caraway, C. Johnston, A. Ping, J. Fogarty, and S.A. Munson. 2016. Beyond abandonment to next steps: Understanding and designing for life after personal informatics tool use. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1109--1113.
[8]
Corinna Fischer. 2008. Feedback on household electricity consumption: A tool for saving energy? Energy Effic. 1, 1 (2008), 79--104.
[9]
Jon Froehlich, Leah Findlater, and James Landay. 2010. The design of eco-feedback technology. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '10, 1999.
[10]
William W. Gaver, John Bowers, Kirsten Boehner, Andy Boucher, David W.T. Cameron, Mark Hauenstein, Nadine Jarvis, and Sarah Pennington. 2013. Indoor weather stations: investigating a ludic approach to environmental HCI through batch prototyping. CHI '13 Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (2013), 3451--3460.
[11]
Alice Grønhøj and John Thøgersen. 2011. Feedback on household electricity consumption: Learning and social influence processes. Int. J. Consum. Stud. (2011).
[12]
Rebecca Gulotta, Jodi Forlizzi, Rayoung Yang, and Mark W. Newman. 2016. Fostering engagement with Personal informatics systems. In DIS 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Fuse, 286--300.
[13]
Tom Hargreaves. 2018. Beyond energy feedback. Build. Res. Inf. 46, 3 (2018), 332--342.
[14]
Tom Hargreaves, Michael Nye, and Jacquelin Burgess. 2013. Keeping energy visible? Exploring how householders interact with feedback from smart energy monitors in the longer term. Energy Policy 52, (2013), 126--134.
[15]
Sue Hogan, Andrew Pascale, Audrey Cetois, and Peta Ashworth. 2018. Building Australia's Energy Literacy. Retrieved from https://www.nera.org.au/Featured-energy-literacy
[16]
Guofeng Ma, Jing Lin, and Nan Li. 2018. Longitudinal assessment of the behavior-changing effect of app-based eco-feedback in residential buildings. Energy Build. 159, (2018), 486--494.
[17]
Ralph Masiello and Julio Romero Aguero. 2016. Sharing the Ride of Power: Understanding Transactive Energy in the Ecosystem of Energy Economics. IEEE Power Energy Mag. 14, 3 (2016), 70--78.
[18]
Andreas Nilsson, Cecilia Jakobsson Bergstad, Liane Thuvander, David Andersson, Kristin Andersson, and Pär Meiling. 2014. Effects of continuous feedback on households' electricity consumption: Potentials and barriers. Appl. Energy 122, (2014), 17--23.
[19]
Andrew Powell. 2012. ClimateSmart Home Service closes saving taxpayers $5 million. Media release: Minister for Environment and Heritage Protection, 1. Retrieved from http://statements.qld.gov.au/Statement/2012/4/26/climatesmart-home-service-closes-saving-taxpayers-5-million
[20]
Press Associatiion. 2018. Smart meter installations "need to hit 30 a minute." The Guardian, 1. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/19/smart-meter-installations-need-to-hit-30-a-minute
[21]
John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers. 2014. Personal tracking as lived informatics. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1163--1172.
[22]
P. Wesley Schultz, Mica Estrada, Joseph Schmitt, Rebecca Sokoloski, and Nilmini Silva-Send. 2015. Using in-home displays to provide smart meter feedback about household electricity consumption: A randomized control trial comparing kilowatts, cost, and social norms. Energy 90, (2015), 351--358.
[23]
Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, and Nicola Spurling. 2015. Conceptualizing connections: Energy demand, infrastructures and social practices. Eur. J. Soc. Theory 18, 3 (2015), 274--287.
[24]
S. Snow, D. Vyas, and M. Brereton. 2015. When an eco-feedback system joins the family. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 19, 5--6 (2015).
[25]
Stephen Snow, Laurie Buys, Paul Roe, and Margot Brereton. 2013. Curiosity to Cupboard: Self Reported Disengagement with Energy Use Feedback over Time. Proc. 25th Aust. Comput. Interact. Conf. Augment. Appl. Innov. Collab. (2013), 245--254.
[26]
Yolande Strengers. 2013. Smart energy technologies in everyday life: Smart Utopia?. Springer.
[27]
Georgina Wood, Rosie Day, Emily Creamer, Dan van der Horst, Atif Hussain, Shuli Liu, Ashish Shukla, Obiajulu Iweka, Mark Gaterell, Panagiotis Petridis, Nicholas Adams, and Victoria Brown. 2019. Sensors, sense-making and sensitivities: UK household experiences with a feedback display on energy consumption and indoor environmental conditions. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 55, (2019), 93--105.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Household Wattch: Exploring Opportunities for Surveillance and Consent through Families’ Household Energy Use DataACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367322831:4(1-30)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)“That is what we can influence”: Exploring energy time-shifting using an always-on display in households with solar panels2024 10th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S)10.1109/ICT4S64576.2024.00040(324-334)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Energy Literacy: A Systematic Review of the Scientific LiteratureEnergies10.3390/en1621723516:21(7235)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
OzCHI '19: Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction
December 2019
631 pages
ISBN:9781450376969
DOI:10.1145/3369457
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 the author(s) 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].

In-Cooperation

  • HFESA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. IHD
  2. In home display
  3. eco-feedback
  4. energy monitor
  5. energy use
  6. engagement
  7. home
  8. situated display

Qualifiers

  • Short-paper
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

  • Advance Queensland Platform Technology Program grant administered by Redback Operations Pty Ltd

Conference

OZCHI'19
OZCHI'19: 31ST AUSTRALIAN CONFERENCE ON HUMAN-COMPUTER-INTERACTION
December 2 - 5, 2019
WA, Fremantle, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)8
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Household Wattch: Exploring Opportunities for Surveillance and Consent through Families’ Household Energy Use DataACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367322831:4(1-30)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)“That is what we can influence”: Exploring energy time-shifting using an always-on display in households with solar panels2024 10th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S)10.1109/ICT4S64576.2024.00040(324-334)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Energy Literacy: A Systematic Review of the Scientific LiteratureEnergies10.3390/en1621723516:21(7235)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Postphenomenological Dimensions of Digitally Mediated Domestic HeatingNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546692(1-13)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Towards Designing Smart Home Energy Applications for Effective UseThe Transdisciplinary Reach of Design Science Research10.1007/978-3-031-06516-3_23(303-314)Online publication date: 25-May-2022
  • (2020)Drivers behind Residential Electricity Demand Fluctuations Due to COVID-19 RestrictionsEnergies10.3390/en1321573813:21(5738)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media