IU Energy Challenge - Capstone by David Roedl
•
1 like•471 views
Please see notes tab below David Roedl's final presentation for M.S. capstone project in Human-Computer Interaction Design May 2008 School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University at Bloomington
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Similar to IU Energy Challenge - Capstone by David Roedl
Similar to IU Energy Challenge - Capstone by David Roedl (20)
IU Energy Challenge - Capstone by David Roedl
- 1. IU Energy Challenge motivating college students to use less design project by David Roedl advised by Eli Blevis
- 6. Background Design & Implementation Results & Criticism Insights & New Concepts
- 7. Background Design & Implementation Results & Criticism Insights & New Concepts
- 8. Intersection of 3 themes Persuasive Technology Sustainable Campus Interaction Design Sustainability
- 9. Intersection of 3 themes Persuasive Technology Sustainable Campus Interaction Design Sustainability
- 11. Sustainable Interaction Design A key emerging area of interest centers on the role that interactive technology can and should play in facilitating more environmentally sustainable behaviors. Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 503-512. Holmes, T. G. (2007). Eco-visualization: combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition. p. 153-162. Mankoff, J., Matthews, D., Fussell, S. R., and Johnson, M. 2007. Leveraging Social Networks To Motivate Individuals to Reduce their Ecological Footprints. In Proceedings HICSS. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 87.
- 12. “Residential and commercial buildings account for two-thirds of the electricity used in the US, 36 percent of US greenhouse gasses, 9 percent of world greenhouse emissions, and 12 percent of US fresh water consumption.” Schipper, L. (1989), “Linking lifestyle and energy used: a matter of time?” , Annual Review of Energy, Vol. 14, pp. 273-320. Wilson, A. and Yost, P. (2001). “Buildings and the environment: the numbers”, Environmental Building News, Vol. 10. Petersen, J. E., Shunturov, V., Janda, K., Platt, G., & Weinberger, K. (2007). Dormitory residents reduce electricity consumption when exposed to real-time visual feedback and incentives. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(1), 16-33.
- 13. “Previous studies have estimated that occupant activities and choices control up to 50 percent of residential energy use, while the balance depends on physical characteristics of buildings and building equipment over which occupants have no control.” Schipper, L. (1989), “Linking lifestyle and energy used: a matter of time?” , Annual Review of Energy, Vol. 14, pp. 273-320. Wilson, A. and Yost, P. (2001). “Buildings and the environment: the numbers”, Environmental Building News, Vol. 10. Petersen, J. E., Shunturov, V., Janda, K., Platt, G., & Weinberger, K. (2007). Dormitory residents reduce electricity consumption when exposed to real-time visual feedback and incentives. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(1), 16-33.
- 14. Sustainability on Campus Consolvo et. al, (2008). Activity Sensing in the Wild: A Field Trial of UbiFit Garden. In Proceedings of CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computer. Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. Friedman, B., Kahn, P., and Borning, A. (2006). Value sensitive design and information systems. In P. Zhang & D. Galletta (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations. M.E Sharpe, New York, 348-372.
- 15. Intersection of 3 themes Persuasive Technology Sustainable Campus Interaction Design Sustainability
- 16. Persuasive Technology Movement in HCI toward informing choices people make in their everyday lives to motivate positive behavioral or social change. Consolvo et. al, (2008). Activity Sensing in the Wild: A Field Trial of UbiFit Garden. In Proceedings of CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computer. Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. Friedman, B., Kahn, P., and Borning, A. (2006). Value sensitive design and information systems. In P. Zhang & D. Galletta (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations. M.E Sharpe, New York, 348-372.
- 17. Intersection of 3 themes Persuasive Technology Sustainable Campus Interaction Design Sustainability
- 18. Sustainable Interaction Design A key emerging area of interest centers on the role that interactive technology can and should play in facilitating more environmentally sustainable behaviors. Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 503-512. Holmes, T. G. (2007). Eco-visualization: combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition. p. 153-162. Mankoff, J., Matthews, D., Fussell, S. R., and Johnson, M. 2007. Leveraging Social Networks To Motivate Individuals to Reduce their Ecological Footprints. In Proceedings HICSS. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 87.
- 19. Intersection of 3 themes Persuasive Technology Sustainable Campus Interaction Design Sustainability
- 20. http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/oberlin/dormenergy/ Petersen, J. E., Shunturov, V., Janda, K., Platt, G., & Weinberger, K. (2007). Dormitory residents reduce electricity consumption when exposed to real-time visual feedback and incentives. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(1), 16-33.
- 21. Can this work at IU? What social and design factors will determine success? http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/oberlin/dormenergy/ Petersen, J. E., Shunturov, V., Janda, K., Platt, G., & Weinberger, K. (2007). Dormitory residents reduce electricity consumption when exposed to real-time visual feedback and incentives. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(1), 16-33.
- 22. Purpose Design and implement a conservation competition utilizing web-based feedback on the IU campus.
- 23. Background Design & Implementation Results & Criticism Insights & New Concepts
- 25. Essential Contributors: David Fuente Planning / PR
- 26. Essential Contributors: Will Odom and James Pierce User Research and Design
- 27. Essential Contributors: Glenn Moulton Metering
- 28. Essential Contributors: Jeff Huang Database
- 29. Essential Contributors: Kelly Breeze Student engagement
- 30. Design Goals 1. reduce overall energy & water consumption 2. raise awareness about environmental effects 3. educate toward long-term sustainable behaviors and attitudes 4. generally advance the broader sustainability initiative at IU
- 31. Contextual Interviews (Will Odom & James Pierce) 6 contextual interviews were conducted with undergraduate residents of dormitories across campus.
- 33. 1. dormitory rooms are often cluttered with electronic devices
- 34. 2. residents are largely unaware of how much energy particular devices and behaviors consume
- 35. 3. students did not know how to reduce their energy consumption beyond the most common strategies.
- 36. 4. consumption behaviors are strongly influenced by their peers
- 37. Contextual Interview: Insights Leverage social motivation. Inform about specific behaviors.
- 38. Competition Structure 10 participating dorms 4 weeks (March 20-April 17) Challenge: Reduce energy and water compared to previous usage 1st Prize: Cookout + $500 2nd Prize: $250 Web-based feedback throughout
- 39. The data Meters were read twice per week Uploaded to a newly created SQL Server database
- 40. Data Process Adobe Flex Data Visualization XML Output PHP Script SQL Server Meter Readings
- 44. Evaluation Results Additional color tagging was needed to help users avoid confusion. Our users did not seem to be motivated by raw numbers of reduction alone (e.g. total tons of carbon dioxide reduced, etc.). Study participants wanted control over seeing both their own impact and their dorm’s total consumption.
- 50. Background Design & Implementation Results & Criticism Insights & New Concepts
- 51. The Winners 1st Place - Briscoe electricity: -31% water: -3% 2nd Place – Teter electricity: -16% water: -14% Average electricity: -15% water: -2.5%
- 52. Estimated Savings electricity: 446,139 KWh equivalent to 743,562 60 watt bulbs burning for 10 hrs water: 613,919 gallons equivalent to 383,700 toilet flushes total cost avoided: $25,972 total CO2 avoided: 801,454 lbs equivalent to 67 cars off the road for 1 year
- 58. Summary Only a minority of students got excited about the competition. But it was enough have significant impact.
- 59. Improvements for next year Better prizes More visibility Include Collins Feedback should be more present and more engaging
- 60. Can this work at IU? What social and design factors will determine success? http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/oberlin/dormenergy/ Petersen, J. E., Shunturov, V., Janda, K., Platt, G., & Weinberger, K. (2007). Dormitory residents reduce electricity consumption when exposed to real-time visual feedback and incentives. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(1), 16-33.
- 61. Background Design & Implementation Results & Criticism Insights & New Concepts
- 62. Factors for motivation Social incentives Influence Individual Behavior feedback
- 63. Social incentive Insight: Social motivation is critical for participation. “…if all the girls on my floor really wanted to win, I’d try to save energy; otherwise, I probably wouldn’t do anything differently.” - Amy, college freshman
- 64. Prescriptive feedback Insight: Students are often unaware of how to best alter behavior to conserve resources. “Besides turning off the lights, I don’t even know what I could do to save energy.” - Sarah, college junior
- 65. Testing Conceptual Directions We conducted preliminary testing to obtain feedback on different conceptual directions. Real-time Ambiguous Consumption Representation Information Competition Social Incentive Standings Prescriptive Feedback
- 66. Pledge Wall / Initial Mockup Student Pledge Action Dormitories with largest projected savings based on pledge data Dormitories with largest actual savings
- 67. Prescriptive / Initial Mockup Device Conservation Action Projected savings (kwh, $) Graphical display of projected weekly usage patterns
- 68. Testing Conceptual Directions We conducted preliminary testing to obtain feedback on different conceptual directions. Real-time Ambiguous Consumption Representation Information Competition Social Incentive Standings Prescriptive Feedback
- 69. Conceptual Directions to Pursue Contextual research and preliminary testing suggest pursuing underexplored conceptual directions: Ambiguous Representation Social Incentive Prescriptive Feedback
- 70. Future Work Apply new interactive concepts to next year’s competition (James Pierce). Design a visualization for all metered buildings on campus (this summer).
- 71. Acknowledgements Utility Information Group • Residence Halls Association • Physical Plant Utilities Sustainability Task Force • Volunteers in Sustainability • RPS • Michael Hamburger • Lee Walters • Loretta Hutchison • Vanessa Curuso Steve Akers • Jeff Kaden • Mark Menefee • Eli Blevis • Youn Lim • Jeff Bardzell • Erik Stolterman • Marty Siegel • HCI/d Classmates
- 73. Benefits An immediate reduction in use - > monetary savings, reduced environmental impact Advancing campus sustainability - > education and awareness, publicity for the initiative Greater understanding of opportunities and challenges involved in designing for behavior change
- 75. Design as Service Design is about creating intentional change to the real world. Design always works within limited time, resources, and knowledge. “Design is about service on behalf of the other.” - Nelson and Stolterman (2003)
- 76. Service Learning Experiential learning through community service and reflection. Primary objective was to implement the competition, intellectual goals were secondary.
- 77. Strategic Design Interaction designs are tactical components in context of a larger system working towards long-term organizational goals. The strategy and entire tactical system are part of the design.
- 78. Prototyping “Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The goal isn't to create a close approximation of the finished product or process; the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we're trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.” -Tim Brown, CEO at IDEO http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html
Editor's Notes
- Thanks, Eli for the introduction and thanks everyone for being here.
- What I’m going talk about is the design, implementation of a dormitory contest that took place on Campus this spring This event, titled the IU Energy Challenge, asked students to compete for 4 weeks to reduce their water and electricity consumption.
- Ultimately, this project seeks to address global issues of climate change and sustainability.
- At the same time, its also concerned with the everyday energy consuming actions that we do tend to take for granted.
- Specifically, the contest aims to draw attention to the relationship between both phenomena, using interactive technology as a mechanism of awareness.
- I will start by covering some background and prior work that inspired this project. Next, I will describe the process of designing and implementing the contest Followed by a discussion of the contest results and a critical look at its successes and failures. Finally, I will conclude by discussing the lessons learned and presenting some new concepts for future work.
- My project is primarily motivated by 3 themes.
- My project is primarily motivated by 3 themes.
- First, it is prompted by ever growing concern about the crisis of global climate change. It is now widely known that there is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What is not so well-known is exactly which behaviors we should change to have the biggest impact.
- A key assertion of my project is that residential energy use is one good place to start.
- For example, residential and commercial buildings account for 36% of US greenhouse gasses
- Furthermore, it has been estimated up to 50% of residential energy use is governed by personal choice and activity. Thus, there are potentially large gains to be made simply by changing habits.
- - In the last year, IU has been considering its institutional role in addressing these and many other issues of sustainability. The campus sustainability report outlines many good ways that IU can promote environmental responsibility. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you take a look.
- My project also follows from a recent movement in HCI, toward using technology to inform people’s everyday choices.
- And especially, my project draws on the notion that interactive technology can and should be used to promote sustainable behaviors [1, 7, 8].
- The intersection of these themes is well represented in the case of the Oberlin Dorm Energy project, which is the primary inspiration for my capstone.
- In 2004, researchers at Oberlin conducted a 2 week conservation contest, in which residence halls competed to save the most energy and water compared to previous usage - Students were able to track their standing in the contest via the dynamic website pictured here. In this novel design, two persuasion strategies were being exploited: a social incentive, in the form of a competiton, and feedback presented by the website. - The study was very successful, achieving an over 30% reduction in use.
- This study prompted me to question whether such a competition would work at IU. Oberlin is small liberal arts college, with an already environmentally conscious student body.. Could this model transfer to a large big ten university? Secondly, what are the social and design factors that really make such an effort successful??
- To answer these questions, I set out to design and implement a similar competition for the IU campus.
- Now I will talk about the work that went into to creating the Energy Challenge.
- I want to emphasize that numerous individuals and groups across campus contributed to make this event a reality. I’ll introduce of few of these individuals now, and many more will be acknowledged at the conclusion.
- David Fuente worked with me from day one to plan the competition and did a lot of great work on the logistics, PR, and general project management
- My HCI colleagues, Will Odom and James Pierce worked closely with me on User research and design
- Glenn Moulton from the Utility Information Group was in charge of reading the meters
- Jeff Huang designed and supported our database.
- Finally, Kelly Breeze was responsible for promoting the competition within the dorms.
- Now, here are my specific design goals. In addition to reducing overall consumption in the dorms, I wanted to also raise awareness about environmental effects towards inspiring a longer-term change of attitude. Also, I hoped that my project would help advance the broader sustainability initiative on campus.
- To better understand the students that we were designing for, we conducted 6 contextual interviews with dorm residents across campus.
- Basically we interviewed students in their rooms, photographed their appliances and asked them about their attitudes towards energy use.
- We observed that dorm rooms were often cluttered with electronic devices.
- Residents were largely unaware of how much particular devices consume.
- Students did not know how to save energy beyond the most common strategies.
- Students did not seem motivated by environmental effects alone, but they were strongly influenced by their peers.
- The main insights that we gained were that to make the competition successful, we needed to: leverage social motivation and provide information about specific ways to conserve.
- The contest was structured very similar to the Oberlin project. Dorms were challenged to reduce energy compared to a baseline average of previous. This baseline is important to keep the contest fair, since each building will have its own inherent efficiency. The first prize was an end-of-the year cookout, sponsored by the residence halls association. The Physical plant donated some prize money to go to student programs.
- A crucial part in being able to hold this competition, was figuring out how to meter the buildings on a frequent basis. Generally, meters are manually read on a monthly basis. During the competition, Glenn donated his time to read each meter twice per week, which allowed us to give students regular feedback. Also a new database was created to make the data accessible over the web.
- This flow chart shows how the data is stored and processed, from when the meters readings are taken, to when it is displayed over the web.
- This is our first working prototype of the visual feedback. The basic component is to show the competition standings, as a way to let the students know about how they are doing relative to their peers. We have one bar graph showing water usage and one showing electricity. Usage is shown as a percentage of the one-month baseline to allow comparison. Then we also have a simple list showing the combined overall ranking.
- After creating this initial design, we realized that it would be much more efficient to combine these three charts into one horizontal clustered bar graph. Here the dorms are listed according to their standing and the dark bar represents electricity and lighter bar water. Also, in this second iteration we added a second component which shows the absolute consumption amounts and the associated co2.
- To evaluate this design we conducted some task-based user tests using paper prototypes. The goal was to see how easily participants could understand the information being presented and also gauge their reactions in terms of motivation to change behavior.
- From this test, we identified several specific issues for improvement.
- To address these issues, we made several changes to our final prototype. Basically, we colored electricity as yellow and water as blue in order to clearly distinguish the two. We also added the conversion metrics in order to make the consumption statistics more intuitive and meaningful. Finally, we added a toggle button to allow the user to switch between per person and whole dorm statistics.
- Here is the official website which I designed. In addition to the interactive visualization, the site also featured news updates, the official rules, and list of conservation tips.
- We created a Facebook group for the contest. Students could join as way to directly receive contest updates and to engage in discussion.
- Kelly Breeze and I designed this promotional poster which was hung on every floor of every dorm.
- We put together several press releases through the IU media group and got some coverage in the Herald times and the IDS.
- So now lets look at what happened. And to do this I want to look at the website and watch the results from start to finish. [http://energychallenge.indiana.edu/standings.html] So here you can this gray line represents the baseline usage. Most of the dorms remained well below. Eigenmann started off with an early lead with started to drop off about half-way through.
- Briscoe took first place by reducing electricity use by 31%. The average reduction was 15% for electricity and 2.5% for water.
- This amounted to an estimated $26,000 in avoided costs. And about 800, 000 lbs of avoided Co2, which is the equivalent of taking 67 cars off the road for one year.
- The website traffic is displayed here. You can see we had about 1700 visitors out of about 10,000 total dorm residents. And most visitors did not come back to the site more than once.
- Our Facebook group got 150 members and a small amount of healthy trash talking.
- We conducted a follow-up survey and got 47 responses.
- We found that the most effective publicity came from the posters, a mass email, and word of mouth. All the other channels played a role as well.
- We asked what issues prevented students from becoming more engaged. Almost half of the participants responded that no one else was competing, so there didn’t seem to be a point. Others said they didnt hear about it soon enough or that prizes were not very enticing.
- To summarize all this: It seems that only a minority of students got really engaged in the competition. If I had to speculate, I would guess maybe 10-15 % But as we saw from the savings, this was enough to have really significant.
- The results also point to some obvious improvements for next year: Better prizes, greater publicity and visibility. Including Collins will leverage the strong activism of their residents. Interactive component needs to be more present and engaging – students didn’t visit the website.
- To return to my initial design questions, I think the answer to the first is a resounding yes. It did work – it gathered a great deal of enthusiasm from all levels of campus and despite leaving room for improvement, great results were achieved. Proving the viability of this concept is a primary contribution of my project. Perhaps more interesting, however, it what was learned about the second questions.
- Data from our interviews and survey suggest participation in the Challenge was determined by dynamic interaction between the individual behavior and social influence of the peer group. Both the incentives and feedback need to be designed to support this relationship. For example in the Energy Challenge, both the reward and feedback and reward were given at the group level. But individuals didn’t feel that whole group was participating. And they didn’t feel that their individual could effect the group performance.
- Will, James and I began mapping various concepts for energy visualization. Two of these are novel concepts, based upon our insights.
- We conducted some informal interviews to evaluate each concept. Preliminary findings suggest that each has promise.
- Some future work: James will be taking over the competition and plans to apply some of the new concepts next year. This summer, I am designing a tool to raise awareness about utility usage for all metered buildings on campus.
- I’d like to thank Eli Blevis who has mentored me for the last two years. Everyone who supported the Energy Challenge. And all my HCI/d professors and classmates. Thanks for your attention and I will now take your questions.
- To start, I want to mention three concepts which characterize my design process
- In their book, the design way, nelson and stolterman write that design is about creating intentional change to the real world. As such, design always works with limited time, resources, and knowledge. Furthermore, design is not solitary; rather it is defined by a dynamic relationship of serving others.
- This is related to the concept of Service Learning, where a student learns experientially by engaging in community service. I consider this capstone service learning, in that my primary objective was implement the competition for the sake of community. Committing to this outcome added significant constraints to my project. But by negotiating these constraints I feel I have learned a great deal about professional design practice.
- Eli Blevis