Switch off the light in the living room, please! –Making eco-feedback meaningful through room context information

Abstract

Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption. However, conscious, sustainable use of this limited resource is hampered by a lack of visibility and materiality of consumption. One of the major challenges is enabling consumers to make informed decisions about energy consumption, thereby supporting the shift to sustainable actions. With the use of Energy-Management-Systems it is possible to save up to 15%. In recent years, design approaches have greatly diversified, but with the emergence of ubiquitous- and context- aware computing, energy feedback solutions can be enriched with additional context information. In this study, we present the concept “room as a context” for eco-feedback systems. We investigate opportunities of making current state-of-the-art energy visualizations more meaningful and demonstrate which new forms of visualizations can be created with this additional information. Furthermore, we developed a prototype for android-based tablets, which includes some of the presented features to study our design concepts in the wild.