James A. Colley

Doing the laundry with agents: a field trial of a future smart energy system in the home

Future energy systems that rely on renewable energy may bring about a radical shift in how we use energy in our homes. We developed and prototyped a future scenario with highly variable, real-time electricity prices due to a grid that mainly relies on renewables. We designed and deployed an agent-based interactive system that enables users to effectively operate the washing machine in this scenario. The system is used to book timeslots of washing machine use so that the agent can help to minimize the cost of a wash by charging a battery at times when electricity is cheap. We carried out a deployment in 10 households in order to uncover the socio-technical challenges around integrating new technologies into everyday routines. The findings reveal tensions that arise when deploying a rationalistic system to manage contingently and socially organized domestic practices. We discuss the trade-offs between utility and convenience inherent in smart grid applications; and illustrate how certain design choices position applications along this spectrum.

Apportioning energy consumption in the workplace: a review of issues in using metering data to motivate staff to save energy

The UK government has set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions, and lowering energy demand within workplaces is important to help meet these. With the rollout of smart metres and the availability of more fine-grained energy monitoring equipment for the workplace, it is increasingly possible to disaggregate collective energy consumption and apportion this among building users. This article presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the rationale and feasibility of different approaches to apportionment to motivate staff to reduce energy consumption. Our review indicates greatest potential for energy saving when consumption is apportioned to small to medium-sized groups, rather than individuals or entire buildings, particularly when they represent existing communities to which staff members strongly identify. We highlight the complexity of technical, psychological, social and organisational factors that not only inspire, but also often confound, efforts to innovate in this area.

Enabling the new economic actor: data protection, the digital economy, and the Databox

AbstractThis paper offers a sociological perspective on data protection regulation and its relevance to design. From this perspective, proposed regulation in Europe and the USA seeks to create a new economic actor—the consumer as personal data trader—through new legal frameworks that shift the locus of agency and control in data processing towards the individual consumer or “data subject”. The sociological perspective on proposed data regulation recognises the reflexive relationship between law and the social order, and the commensurate needs to balance the demand for compliance with the design of computational tools that enable this new economic actor. We present the Databox model as a means of providing data protection and allowing the individual to exploit personal data to become an active player in the emerging data economy.

Energy advisors at work: charity work practices to support people in fuel poverty

We present an ethnographic study of energy advisors working for a charity that provides support, particularly to people in fuel poverty. Our fieldwork comprises detailed observations that reveal the collaborative, interactional work of energy advisors and clients during home visits, supplemented with interviews and a participatory design workshop with advisors. We identify opportunities for Ubicomp technologies that focus on supporting the work of the advisor, including complementing the collaborative advice giving in home visits, providing help remotely, and producing evidence in support of accounts of practices and building conditions useful for interactions with landlords, authorities and other third parties. We highlight six specific design challenges that relate the domestic fuel poverty setting to the wider Ubicomp literature. Our work echoes a shift in attention from energy use and the individual consumer, specifically to matters of advice work practices and the domestic fuel poverty setting, and to the discourse around inclusive Ubicomp technologies.

Data Work: How Energy Advisors and Clients Make IoT Data Accountable

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the ‘overhead cost’ of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.

Building accountability into the Internet of Things: the IoT Databox model

This paper outlines the IoT Databox model as a means of making the Internet of Things (IoT) accountable to individuals. Accountability is a key to building consumer trust and is mandated by the European Union’s general data protection regulation (GDPR). We focus here on the ‘external’ data subject accountability requirement specified by GDPR and how meeting this requirement turns on surfacing the invisible actions and interactions of connected devices and the social arrangements in which they are embedded. The IoT Databox model is proposed as an in principle means of enabling accountability and providing individuals with the mechanisms needed to build trust into the IoT.

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.

“What do you want for dinner?” – need anticipation and the design of proactive technologies for the home

This paper examines ‘the routine shop’ as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the ‘work’ involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, ‘seen but unnoticed’ methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members’ methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.