Designs Household Energy Consumption - adrienerice/The_Chosen_Ones GitHub Wiki

Design Conceptualisation

Energy Visibility by Feedback

The invisibility of energy has resulted in a disconnect between user behaviour and energy consumption, hence the concept of energy visibility aims to make energy visible so that users can make the connection between their behaviour and their energy consumption. Additionally, the concept of energy visibility aims to address the issue of awareness, where the awareness of ones habits and actions, would be integral in order to motivate change within the user.

Ideas for Alternative Behaviours

Energy visibility and feedback should be accompanied by recommendations that are easily actionable by the user in order to prompt users to undertake actions or perform tasks which are more energy efficient alternatives to what is currently being done.

Alternative Conceptualisations

• Traffic light visuals on users had a positive effect on their efforts to conserve energy due to its obvious and recognisable colour scheme (Strengers, 2011). However:

• Using the inanimate lighting object on its own would be unable to provide detailed energy consumption information like historical data.
• Combining the inanimate lighting object with an interactive interface seemed counter intuitive as users must refer to two pieces of technology in order to receive information, as well as the inanimate lighting object potentially making the interactive interface obsolete or not useful in the eyes of users.
• The inanimate lighting object itself cannot provide recommendations for alternative behaviours or practices that would be more efficient.

Existing Solution Conceptualisations

The use of energy use charts have been widely used by designers and developers to provide users with understandable energy data, seen below is an energy use application by Kogan. While this provides users with a lot of good insights and the potential to reduce energy consumption, this application assumes all individuals can be equally motivated and are micro-resource managers when presented with data. Additionally, the application does not provide other tools for managing and reducing energy consumption.

Conceptualisations of Social & Mobile Computing

• Awareness: Being able to monitor the actions of household members in their consumption of energy through observation of appliances in use and members currently home features.
• Activity traces: Being able to see household progress and historical energy consumption data in the statistics features.
• Coordination: Being able to plan tasks such as undertaking laundry or cooking meals with others as opposed to undertaking them themselves.
• Collaboration: Household members collaborating and work towards the common goal of reducing energy consumption and undertaking more tasks as a team than as an individual.
• Location Awareness: Being able to sense the current energy consumption situation by gathering information from sensors throughout the household as well as GPS location of household members, and reacting to this information by relaying information back to the user on the interactive device.

Initial Designs of Mobile Application Design

From the written design conceptualisations initial sketches of some of the main features were drafted:

Revised Designs of Mobile Application

From the initial sketches as well as additional research and a revised target audience, more refined and detailed sketches were drafted.

Interaction Scenarios

Personas