Benjamin Bedwell

Understanding Energy Consumption at Work: Learning from Arrow Hill

Most work around technological interventions for energy conservation to date has focussed on changing individual behaviour. Hence, there is limited understanding of communal settings, such as office environments, as sites for intervention. Even when energy consumption in the workplace has been considered, the emphasis has typically been on the individual. To address this gap, we conducted a study of energy consumption and management in one workplace, based on a combination of workshops with a broad range of stakeholders, and quantitative data inspections. We report and discuss findings from this study, in light of prior literature, and we present a set of implications for design and further research. In particular, three themes, and associated intervention opportunities, emerged from our data: (1) energy wastage related to “errors”; (2) the role of company policies and the negotiation that surrounds their implementation; and (3) the bigger energy picture of procurement, construction and travel.

IdleWars: An Evaluation of a Pervasive Game to Promote Sustainable Behaviour in the Workplace

Energy reduction is one of the main challenges that countries around the world currently face, and there is potential to contribute to this by raising awareness towards sustainability in the workplace. We introduce IdleWars, a pervasive game played using smartphones and computers. In the game, workers’ proenvironmental or wasteful behaviour is reflected in their game score, and displayed through eco-feedback visualisations to try and call attention to energy wastage and potentially reduce it. A field deployment, over two weeks in a medium sized organisation, revealed that the physical and competitive elements of the game work well in engaging participants and stimulating discussion around energy wasted and conservation. However, the game turned out to encourage also some anti-conservation behaviours, as participants appropriated the game and extended its rules, sometimes in a way that favoured engagement and fun rather than proenvironmental behaviour. More in general, our study uncovered how both the game and idle time reduction in itself can rub against the daily practices of the workplace where the study was run.

Participant Experiences of Mobile Device-Based Diary Studies

Mobile device-based diary studies have potential as contextual data capture methods that address the limitations of the traditional paper-based diary method. While there have been a number of studies that demonstrate the power of the mobile device-based diary approach, there is less known about participants’ experience of such studies. This paper presents three cases of mobile data capture to bring together user experiences of participating in diary studies and discuss how this can be fed into the design of methodology.

When Push Comes to Shove: Compensating and Opportunistic Strategies in a Collective-Risk Household Energy Dilemma

To solve problems like climate change, every little push counts. Community energy schemes are a popular policy targeted to reduce a country’s carbon emissions but the effect they have on energy use depends on whether people can work together as a community. We often find ourselves caught in a dilemma: if others are not doing their bit, why should I? In our experiment participants (N = 118) were matched in groups of 10 to play in a collective-risk game framed as a community energy purchase scheme. They made only one decision about energy use for their virtual household a day, whilst a full round of the game lasted one week in real time. All decisions were entered via personal phone or a home computer. If in the end of the week the group exceeded a pre-paid threshold of energy use, all group members would share a fine. Each day participants received feedback about decisions of their group partners, and in some groups the feedback was manipulated as high (unfair condition) or low (fair condition) use. High average group use created individual risk for participants to be penalized in the end of the week, even if they did not use much themselves. We found that under the risk of having to pay a fine, participants stayed significantly below the fair-share threshold regardless of unfair behaviour of others. On the contrary, they significantly decreased their consumption towards the end of the game. Seeing that others are doing their bit – using a fair-share – encouraged people to take advantage of the situation: those who played against fair confederates did not follow the normative behaviour but conversely, increased their consumption over the course of the game. These opportunistic strategies were demonstrated by impulsive participants who were also low in punishment sensitivity. We discuss the findings in the light of policy research as well as literature on cooperation and prosocial behaviour.

Retroflection: Self-Reflection for Knowledge and Culture Sustainability

Self-Reflection constitutes a medium and a method for recording personal experiences and activities. It allows for both concurrent and retrospective reflections bringing awareness of processes, emotions and situations. Awareness can enhance experiential learning and knowledge acquisition. This is particularly important within the digital humanities field as self-reflection can reveal not only personal experiences while navigating within a cultural space but can also provide opportunities for acquiring new knowledge, built on the generated experiences, thus sustaining and developing socio-cultural knowledge. We call this process retroflection. This short paper discusses how self-reflection can facilitate sustainability of knowledge within a cultural setting and through a platform developed for sharing self-reflection experiences.

Exploring Reactions to Widespread Energy Monitoring

This paper explores the measurement, apportionment and representation of widespread energy monitoring. We explicate the accountability to users of the data collected by this type of monitoring when it is presented to them as a single daylong picture. We developed a technology probe that combines energy measurement from the home, workplace and the journeys that connect these spaces. Through deployment of this probe with five users for one month we find that measurement need not be seamless for it to be accountable; that apportionment is key to making consumption for communal spaces accountable and that people can readily make useful inferences about their energy consumption from daylong pictures formed from widespread monitoring. Finally, we present four issues raised by the probe – the nature of real world monitoring, the dynamic and social nature of apportionment, disclosure of energy data and alignment of incentives with consumption – that need to be addressed in future research.

Digital energy visualizations in the workplace: the e-Genie tool

ABSTRACT Building management systems are designed for energy managers; there are few energy-feedback systems designed to engage staff. A tool, known as e-Genie, was created with the purpose of engaging workplace occupants with energy data and supporting them to take action to reduce energy use. Building on research insights within the field, e-Genie’s novel approach encourages users to make plans to meet energy-saving goals, supports discussion and considers social energy behaviours (e.g. discussing energy issues, taking part in campaigns) as well as individual actions. A field-based study of e-Genie indicated that visualizations of energy data were engaging and that the discussion ‘Pinboard’ was particularly popular. Pre- and post-survey (N = 77) evaluation of users indicated that people were significantly more concerned about energy issues and reported engaging more in social energy behaviour after about two weeks of e-Genie being installed. Concurrently, objective measures of electricity use decreased over the same period, and continued decreasing over subsequent weeks. Indications are that occupant-facing energy-feedback visualizations can be successful in reducing energy use in the workplace; furthermore, supporting social energy behaviour in the workplace is likely to be a useful direction for promoting action.

The Role of Accidental Self-Reflection in Wearable Camera Research

Self-reflection is an important tool for understanding and encouraging behavior change for wellbeing and personal sustainability. This can be a deliberate choice, or unintentionally prompted decision. In this paper we discuss self-reflection on participating in an experience sampling study. 14 Participants wore an Autographer camera for five working days. During the post study interview participants reflected on whether the camera prompted self-reflection or behavior change. We discuss how the experience of wearing cameras can prompt changes in routines through self-reflection, and the implications of this for sustainability research in HCI.

Understanding Energy Consumption at Work: Learning from Arrow Hill (Dataset)

Most work around technological interventions for energy conservation to date has focussed on changing individual behaviour. Hence, there is limited understanding of communal settings, such as office environments, as sites for intervention. Even when energy consumption in the workplace has been considered, the emphasis has typically been on the individual. To address this gap, we conducted a study of energy consumption and management in one workplace, based on a combination of workshops with a broad range of stakeholders, and quantitative data inspections. This dataset contains Building Management Systems readings from two council buildings: those that were shown to workshop participants from Arrow Hill* (electricity, temperature, and gas consumption); and those from Dorton House* (gas and electricity) which allowed us to identify an inconsistency in the buildings heating settings.* Invented names to protect the privacy of our participants