Socially Intelligent Interfaces for Increased Energy Awareness in the Home

TL;DR

This paper proposes socially aware home appliance interfaces that enhance user energy awareness and control, balancing comfort with environmental goals, supported by a prototype demonstrating these principles.

Contribution

It introduces design principles for socially aware energy interfaces and presents a functional prototype implementing these concepts.

Findings

Prototype successfully signals peer group energy usage

Design principles improve user awareness and control

Potential to reduce household energy consumption

Abstract

This paper describes how home appliances might be enhanced to improve user awareness of energy usage. Households wish to lead comfortable and manageable lives. Balancing this reasonable desire with the environmental and political goal of reducing electricity usage is a challenge that we claim is best met through the design of interfaces that allows users better control of their usage and unobtrusively informs them of the actions of their peers. A set of design principles along these lines is formulated in this paper. We have built a fully functional prototype home appliance with a socially aware interface to signal the aggregate usage of the users peer group according to these principles, and present the prototype in the paper.