Hanna Hasselqvist

Linking Data to Action: Designing for Amateur Energy Management

Design of eco-feedback has primarily aimed at persuading individuals to change behaviours into more environmentally sustainable ones. However, it has been questioned how effective such feedback is in supporting long-term change. As an alternative focus for energy feedback, we present a case study of amateur energy management work in apartment buildings owned by housing cooperatives, and the design of an app that aims to stimulate and support cooperatives in taking energy actions that significantly reduce the cooperatives collective energy use. By linking energy data to energy actions, the users can see how actions taken in their own and other cooperatives affected the energy use, learn from each others experiences and become motivated as energy amateurs. Based on our housing cooperative case, we reflect on design aspects to consider when designing for energy management in amateur settings.

Supercomputers Keeping People Warm in the Winter

We present the design and evaluation of the heat recovery system for KTHs Lindgren, Stockholms fastest supercomputer, a Cray XE6. Lindgren came into service in 2010 and has since been primarily u ...

Supporting Energy Management as a Cooperative Amateur Activity

There is increasing concern regarding current energy feedback approaches as they focus on the individual level, and mostly on household electricity, while the bulk of energy use often lies in heating and cooling. The aim is typically to change user routines, which does not bring a long-lasting impact. In our case study, we address these concerns for apartment buildings by looking at housing cooperatives, the dominant form of apartment ownership in the Nordic countries. These cooperatives manage the heating costs in common and therefore have a large potential for energy saving through long-lasting improvements and investments. We also emphasize the amateur nature of energy work within such cooperatives and consider the implications of our field study findings, interpreted through these amateur and cooperative perspectives, for the design of interactive artifacts.

YouPower: An open source platform for community-oriented smart grid user engagement

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge peoples attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in peoples daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Embedding internet-of-things in large-scale socio-technical systems: A community-oriented design in future smart grids

In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components—people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind—that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.