Bertrand Lasternas

Beyond Eco-Feedback: Adding Online Manual and Automated Controls to Promote Workplace Sustainability

Whereas eco-feedback has been widely studied in HCI and environmental psychology, online manual control and automated control have been rarely studied with a focus on their long-term quantitative impact and usability. To address this, an intervention was tested with eighty office workers for twenty-seven weeks. Through the long-term field test, it was found that the addition of online controls in the feedback intervention led to more energy savings than feedback only and worked better for light and phone usage than computer and monitor usage. The addition of automated control led to the greatest savings but was less effective for efficient users than inefficient ones.

The Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Energy Dashboard for Sustainability in the Workplace

Office workers typically don’t know how much energy they consume at work. Since the workers don’t pay the energy bills, they tend to waste energy. To support energy conservation and motivate workers, the Intelligent Dashboard for Occupants (ID-O) was developed using multiple intervention strategies – eco-feedback (self-monitoring, advice, and comparison), remote controls, and automated controls. The baseline data was collected for fourteen weeks from eighty office workers and ID-Os with different features were deployed for seven weeks. The results show that the group with all the features (eco-feedback, remote controls, automated controls) made the biggest energy savings at 35.4%, the group that had eco-feedback and the remote controls showed 20.2% energy savings, the feedback only group achieved 9% energy savings, and the last group (the control group) produced 3.6% energy savings. The automated control feature produced the biggest energy savings, and was most effective in energy management for lights and phones, but not for computers and monitors.

Investigating Sustainability Stages in the Workplace

Prior research on stage-based, behavior-change models investigated intervention effectiveness for stress management, smoking cessation, weight management, adherence to lipid-lowering drugs and the like. Few sustainability centered studies identify people’s stage-based levels for energy use reduction or sustainability. In this paper, we investigate sustainability stages with measured behavior and eco-awareness scores based on Geller’s behavior change model. Eighty office employees were assigned to one of four experimental energy dashboard conditions: (a) no energy dashboard; (b) feedback only; (c) feedback and manual on/off controls; and (d) feedback, manual on/off controls, and on/off calendaring. We measured with pre-post surveys change in sustainability levels, energy efficiency discussions frequency, and organizational efforts to understand the work environment. We found that the dashboard with feedback, controls, and on/off calendaring were significantly associated with reported greater energy saving behavior compared to no energy dashboards, and dashboards with fewer features (i.e., feedback only; feedback and on/off control).