Timo Jakobi

What People Do with Consumption Feedback: A Long-Term Living Lab Study of a Home Energy Management System

Oneofthegreatsocietalchallengesthatwefacetodayconcernsthemovetomoresustainablepatterns of energy consumption, reflecting the need to balance both individual consumer choice and societal demands. In order for this ‘energy turnaround’ to take place, however, reducing residential energy consumptionmustgobeyondusingenergy-efficientdevices:Moresustainablebehaviourandlifestyles are essential parts of future ‘energy aware’living.Addressing this issue from an HCI perspective, this paper presents the results of a 3-year research project dealing with the co-design and appropriation of a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that has been rolled out in a living lab setting with seven households for a period of 18 months. Our HEMS is inspired by feedback systems in Sustainable Interaction Design and allows the monitoring of energy consumption in real-time. In contrast to existing research mainly focusing on how technology can persuade people to consume less energy (‘what technology does to people’), our study focuses on the appropriation of energy feedback systems(‘whatpeopledowithtechnology’)andhownewlydevelopedpracticescanbecomearesource for future technology design.Therefore, we deliberately followed an open research design. In keeping with this approach, our study uncovers various responses, practices and obstacles of HEMS use. We show that HEMS use is characterized by a number of different features. Recognizing the distinctive patterns of technology use in the different households and the evolutionary character of that use within the households, we conclude with a discussion of these patterns in relation to existing research and their meaning for the design of future HEMSs. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • We developed an own Home Energy Management System (HEMS). • We rolled out our HEMS system in a living lab setting to seven households over a period of 18 months. • Our System provides feedback through TV, PC, smartphone and tablet-based interfaces. • This allowed us to explore ‘what people do with HEMS in daily life’. • We identify and discuss nine meaningful categories of appropriating HEMS. • Based on our results, we discuss potentials for the design of future HEMSs.

The Catch(es) with Smart Home: Experiences of a Living Lab Field Study

Smart home systems are becoming an integral feature of the emerging home IT market. Under this general term, products mainly address issues of security, energy savings and comfort. Comprehensive systems that cover several use cases are typically operated and managed via a unified dashboard. Unfortunately, research targeting user experience (UX) design for smart home interaction that spans several use cases or covering the entire system is scarce. Furthermore, existing comprehensive and user-centered longterm studies on challenges and needs throughout phases of information collection, installation and operation of smart home systems are technologically outdated. Our 18-month Living Lab study covering 14 households equipped with smart home technology provides insights on how to design for improving smart home appropriation. This includes a stronger sensibility for household practices during setup and configuration, flexible visualizations for evolving demands and an extension of smart home beyond the location.

What Happened in my Home?: An End-User Development Approach for Smart Home Data Visualization

Smart home systems change the way we experience the home. While there are established research fields within HCI for visualizing specific use cases of a smart home, studies targeting user demands on visualizations spanning across multiple use cases are rare. Especially, individual data-related demands pose a challenge for usable visualizations. To investigate potentials of an end-user development (EUD) approach for flexibly supporting such demands, we developed a smart home system featuring both pre-defined visualizations and a visualization creation tool. To evaluate our concept, we installed our prototype in 12 households as part of a Living Lab study. Results are based on three interview studies, a design workshop and system log data. We identified eight overarching interests in home data and show how participants used pre-defined visualizations to get an overview and the creation tool to not only address specific use cases but also to answer questions by creating temporary visualizations.

Placing information at home: using room context in domestic design

Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of the EUs total energy consumption [2]. With current consumption feedback systems, dwellers have the opportunity to get disaggregated real-time energy feedback about their consumption. However, there is often an absence of additional context information, so that the user is not able to derive energy efficient behavior from their energy data. Against this background, this study presents a concept, where indoor-positioning data on room level are used to contextualize energy data. This makes it possible to expend visualizations of current consumption feedback systems and develop new kind of user-interfaces that support everyday-activities.

Beyond Eco-feedback: Using Room as a Context to Design New Eco-support Features at Home

In recent years research in Sustainable Interaction Design has put major efforts into understanding the potentials of saving energy in private households by providing energy consumption feedback. Trying to overcome pitfalls such as invisibility and immateriality, a great variety of designs with saving potentials from 5–15 %, has emerged. However, feedback mechanisms are mostly reduced to a one-dimensional view on motivating energy savings. In this paper, we argue to take a broader view on eco-support, where eco-feedback should be used in combination with eco-control and eco-automation features. All these features have in common that they aim to reduce energy consumption in practice. From such a holistic understanding of eco-support, we demonstrate how design could benefit from ubiquitous- and context-aware computing approaches to enrich feedback, increase control and automatize cumbersome and boring routines. We use the presence of a user on room level as context information. Rooms present an essential domestic ordering system that structures daily routines at home. In this paper, we show that the usage of room-as-a-context has fundamental implications for the design of domestic indoor localization concepts. In addition, we show how the different types of eco-support systems benefit from it. We illustrate our consideration by presenting a prototype for Android based tablets, which was used to study the design concepts in the wild.

Role-based Eco-info Systems: An Organizational Theoretical View of Sustainable HCI at Work

So far, sustainable HCI has mainly focused on the domestic context, but there is a growing body of work looking at the organizational context. As in the domestic context, these works still rest on psychological theories for behaviour change used for the domestic context. We supplement this view with an organizational theory-informed approach that adopts organizational roles as a key element. We will show how a role-based analysis could be applied to uncover information needs and to give employee’s eco-feedback, which is linked to their tasks at hand. We illustrate the approach on a qualitative case study that was part of a broader, on-going action research conducted in a German production company.

Second Dashboard: Information Demands in a Connected Car

Traditionally automotive UI focusses on the ergonomic design of controls and the user experience in the car. Bringing networked sensors into the car, connected cars can provide additional information to car drivers and owners, for and beyond the driving task. While there already are technological solutions, such as mobile applications commercially available, research on users’ information demands in such applications is scarce. We conducted four focus groups to uncover what kind of information users might be interested in to see on a second dashboard. Our findings show that besides control screens of todays’ dashboards, people are also interested in connected car services providing context information for a current driving situation and allowing strategic planning of driving safety or supporting car management when not driving. Our use cases inform the design of content for secondary dashboards for and especially beyond the driving context with a user perspective.

Towards Collaborative Green Business Process Management as a Conceptual Framework

Organizational strategies for saving energy are currently largely defined by three main courses of action: From a process organization perspective, efforts are being made to optimize processes and invest into more energy efficient infrastructure; from a behavioral perspective, one-time interventions such as energy campaigns or feedback mechanisms are common means to reduce environmental impact. However, both approaches face limitations concerning the scope of intervention. Researching organizational needs in the wild, we conducted action-based research regarding energy optimization practices. We discovered a lack of integrated approaches as regards fostering sustainability in organizations and deriving strategies for bridging the gap between strategic planning and everyday work in order to manage sustainability strategies more effectively and efficiently. We conclude by laying out a research agenda, which we seek to address in course of the ongoing research project in order to gain more sophisticated understanding of how to conduct collaborative green business process management in the wild.

Das Zuhause smart machen – Erfahrungen aus Nutzersicht

Kleinere, gunstigere und effizientere Sensoren und Aktoren sowie Funkprotokolle haben dazu gefuhrt, dass Smart Home Produkte in zunehmend auch fur den privaten Massenmarkt erschwinglich werden. Damit stehen Hersteller und Anbieter vor der Herausforderung, komplexe cyber-physische Systeme fur Jedermann handhabbar zu gestalten. Es fehlen allerdings empirische Erkenntnisse uber die Rolle von Smart Home im Alltag. Wir prasentieren Ergebnisse aus einer Living Lab Studie, in der 14 Haushalte mit einer am Markt erhaltlichen Smart Home Nachrustlosung ausgestattet und uber neun Monate empirisch begleitet wurden. Anhand der Analyse von Interviews, Beobachtungen und Co-Design Workshops in den Phasen der Produktauswahl, Installation, Konfiguration und langerfristigen Nutzung zeigen wir Herausforderungen und Potentiale von Smart Home Systemen auf. Unsere Erkenntnisse deuten darauf hin, dass das Smart Home immer noch von technischen Details dominiert wird. Zugleich fehlen Nutzern angemessene Steuerungs- und Kontrollmoglichkeiten, um weiterhin die Entscheidungshoheit im eigenen Zuhause zu behalten.

User Integration in Agile Software Development Processes: Practices and Challenges in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

HCI and CSCW research as well as practice has strongly indicated the value of integrating (end) users in software development processes. Such integration can help address actual needs and wants, to avoid undesirable developments and to strengthen the User Experience of a product. A user-focused approach to software development has some conceptual overlap with agile software development practices, such as quick and iterative (user) testing. However, out in the wild, organisations seem to have difficulties actually mapping user-centered development with agile processes for a variety of reasons ranging from organisational or hierarchical aspects up to financial issues. This problem seems specially prevalent in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) where such constraints can be even tighter than in larger organisations. To help understand those problems and to identify possible solutions, we turned to three quite different German software SMEs, varying in size, market focus and organisational structure. By way of qualitative field studies, we were able to identify key roles and tools as well as methodological, organisational and analytical practices and challenges in integrating (end) users into agile software development.