Socially Intelligent Interfaces for Increased Energy Awareness in the Home
This work addresses energy awareness for households, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interface design principles without introducing a new method.
The paper tackles the challenge of balancing household comfort with energy reduction by proposing socially intelligent interfaces for home appliances, resulting in a functional prototype that signals peer group usage.
This paper describes how home appliances might be enhanced to improve user awareness of energy usage. Households wish to lead comfortable and manageable lives. Balancing this reasonable desire with the environmental and political goal of reducing electricity usage is a challenge that we claim is best met through the design of interfaces that allows users better control of their usage and unobtrusively informs them of the actions of their peers. A set of design principles along these lines is formulated in this paper. We have built a fully functional prototype home appliance with a socially aware interface to signal the aggregate usage of the users peer group according to these principles, and present the prototype in the paper.