Cecilia Katzeff

Evaluation of a pervasive game for domestic energy engagement among teenagers

In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phone-based game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the games evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues.

The PowerHouse: a persuasive computer game designed to raise awareness of domestic energy consumption

Persuasive technologies can be useful to modify behaviors related to energy usage. In this paper, we present the PowerHouse a computer game designed to influence behaviors associated with energy use and promote an energy-aware lifestyle among teenagers. This prototype game aims to influence a set of target activities in the home using several persuasive techniques. Employing the format of a reality TV show (docu soap), the game informs implicitly and explicitly about various energy-efficient actions. We discuss our overall game design and its advantages and disadvantages in relation to the methods we have employed in the game.

Promoting new patterns in household energy consumption with pervasive learning games

Engaging computer games can be used to change energy consumption patterns in the home. PowerAgent is a pervasive game for Java-enabled mobile phones that is designed to influence everyday activities and use of electricity in the domestic setting. PowerAgent is connected to the households automatic electricity meter reading equipment via the cell network, and this setup makes it possible to use actual consumption data in the game. In this paper, we present a two-level model for cognitive and behavior learning, and we discuss the properties of PowerAgent in relation to the underlying situated learning, social learning, and persuasive technology components that we have included in the game.

Eco-Feedback on the Go: Motivating Energy Awareness

The EnergyLife mobile interface incorporates lessons from environmental psychology and feedback intervention to relay information from appliance sensors, offering a gaming environment that rewards users for decreased electricity consumption.

Watt-Lite: energy statistics made tangible

Increasing our knowledge of how design affects behaviour in the workplace has a large potential for reducing electricity consumption. This would be beneficial for the environment as well as for industry and society at large. In Western society energy use is hidden and for the great mass of consumers its consequences are poorly understood. In order to better understand how we can use design to increase awareness of electricity consumption in everyday life, we will discuss the design of Watt-Lite, a set of three oversized torches projecting real time energy statistics of a factory in the physical environments of its employees. The design of Watt-Lite is meant to explore ways of representing, understanding and interacting with electricity in industrial workspaces. We discuss three design inquiries and their implications for the design of Watt-Lite: the use of tangible statistics; exploratory interaction and transferred connotations.

Social Practices, Households, and Design in the Smart Grid

Considerable effort is put into the design and development of cleaner and more efficient energy systems. In this paper, we describe the problems arising when these systems are designed from a top-down technological perspective and when much development fails to account for the complex processes involved since people and their practices are key parts of transitioning to new systems. The transition to a smart grid not only demands new technologies, but is also fundamentally dependent on households taking on a role as co-managers of the energy system. The chapter illustrates how the emerging research field of “sustainable interaction design” may play a role in supporting these roles and in shaping sustainable practices.

Exploring Sustainable Practices in Workplace Settings through Visualizing Electricity Consumption

People’s domestic habits are increasingly being targeted to reduce levels of CO2 emissions. Whereas domestic energy consumption has received a lot of attention with several reported studies on sustainable practices, there are very few studies on workplace practices. Nevertheless, these are considered as having much potential for reducing energy consumption. This article presents the findings from two field studies where two different types of prototypes for visualizing energy use were designed, implemented and evaluated in different types of workplace settings -- factories and offices. The studies used design probes to explore how visual feedback for electricity use was interpreted and acted upon by employees in work settings. A striking observation was that it is very difficult to get people to change to more pro-environmental behavior and practices in a workplace environment. The article discusses why this might be the case.

User-centred design and evaluation of EnergyCoach – an interactive energy service for households

The article presents a case study of a user-centred design process of an energy service to be used by households. This case study is used to explore the nature of participation of users in the design process. The purpose of the design was to create a prototype for an IT-based service to facilitate for households to learn about their electricity consumption and implicitly to reduce it. By applying methods from human–computer interaction (HCI) throughout the design process, we designed the digital prototype EnergyCoach. The final prototype of EnergyCoach is structured to visualise electricity consumption in households and to coach members of the household in learning about, and reducing their own consumption. The service is mediated through a combination of a web-based platform and one for the mobile phone. EnergyCoach was tested and evaluated in its intended context. Qualitative interviews were carried out with six households who tested the service for six months in their home environment. Results reveal that although the design of EnergyCoach was appreciated and the service as such considered useful, informants varied in how frequently they used it. Reasons to this are discussed and related to methods for early and later phases of the design process.

Dealing with a database query language in a new situation

The experiment presented constitutes an initial attempt to create a model of the end user of a database query language. The central issue is the cognitive behaviour reflected when a user faces a query condition which is similar to, but more complex than those conditions he has been taught to deal with. This behaviour is characterized by its problem-solving nature. In order to approach an understanding of the cognitive processes involved, a task analysis is undertaken. The instruction text to the query language is seen as a major ingredient of the task analysis. The analysis suggests that subjects may focus on different aspects of the instruction text. Data derived by recording the subjects “thinking aloud” provide support for this expectation. Four different routes to the solution of the “new” questions are identified.

Eco-feedback Visualization for Closing the Gap of Organic Food Consumption

This paper presents the results of EcoPanel, an eco-feedback visualization created in collaboration with a Swedish food retailer. The visualization uses automatic data gathering to provide consumers with detailed information and long-term trends about their organic food consumption. The results from a five months test with 65 users show an increase in organic purchases compared to the control group, especially for the users who overestimated their percentage of organic food before the test. From the results we point out the possibilities of using visualization as a way of creating insight on behaviors such as food consumption, that are difficult to grasp from individual actions. This insight can be a way of closing the gap between attitudes and actual behavior, helping users that are already aware and willing to change, to perform more sustainable.