Abstract
The design of technological interventions to motivate behaviour-based reductions in end-user energy consumption has recently been identified as a priority for the HCI community. Previous interventions have produced promising results, but have typically focused on domestic energy consumption. By contrast, this paper focuses on the workplace context, which presents very different opportunities and challenges. For instance, financial consequences, which have proved successful as motivations in the domestic environment, are not present in the workplace in the context of employees. We describe the outcome of a sequence of workshops that focussed on understanding employee perceptions of energy use in the workplace, with the locus of activity on energy intervention design. Using a grounded theory analysis, we produced a framework of key themes detailing user perceptions and energy intervention design considerations. Our findings provide a framework of considerations for the design of successful workplace energy interventions.
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‘Watts in it for me?’ Design Implications for Implementing Effective Energy Interventions in Organisations
1. „Watts in it for me?‟ Design Implications for Implementing
Effective Energy Interventions in Organisations
Derek Foster
Shaun Lawson
Conor Linehan
Jamie Wardman
Mark Blythe
2. Overview
• Introduction & Background
• Organisational Energy Workshops
• Grounded Theory
• Findings
• Future Work
3. Introduction - Electro Magnates Project
Electro-Magnates is a cutting edge carbon-reducing
sustainability project at the intersection of computer
science, social media and behaviour change. The project
involves displaying energy feedback to universities and
organisations to encourage positive behaviour change n
energy consumption.
4. Introduction - Why Organisational Energy?
• Large pubic and private sector organisations account for 10%
of UK emissions.
• 45% of UK Business energy consumption is by SME‟s.
• Potential SME energy wastage costing in the region of
£1.1billion by inefficient practices can be tackled through
behaviour change and raised awareness of green practices.
• Rising energy costs.
• Carbon taxes.
5. Introduction - Previous Domestic Research
• Two unique domestic energy studies delivering socially
mediated live energy feedback inside a Facebook
application.
• Work presented here builds on findings of successful energy
interventions that utilise social media attributes.
• Wattsup paper Nordichi‟10: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/3155/
• Power Ballads paper CHI‟11:
http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/4104/
6. highlights that people can have a significant impact on
Introductionat– work, as well as in their ownNoise
consumption Employees aren’t just personal
environments.
Figure 1 Campusin 2010
Closed for snow
electricity usage December 2009/10
The weekend
Despite environmental concerns now playing an established
role in the public sector, as well as the corporate and
7. Workshops
• Workshops included participatory design and focus
group methods to engender a user-centred approach in
understanding energy consumption in the workplace.
• 3 day-long dashboard and organisational energy workshops
run across 3 locations.
• 65 participants took part from 5 universities and a number
of organisations, some from the energy sector.
• Job roles of participants included
academics, administration, managers, marketing, engineeri
ng, librarians, IT support and institutional leaders .
9. Workshops
• Workshop structure comprised:
• Quantitative and qualitative survey
• Energy intervention design challenge in groups
• Data Collection
• Video
• Audio
• Written and design accounts
10. Workshops
• Design task results formed core data analysis:
• Participants asked to design 12 month intervention
• Adopt technologies of their choosing
• Carried out in groups of 4-5 in 2 hours
• Information given for task reflection:
• Recruitment strategies
• Energy feedback
• Sustaining beyond intervention timescale
12. Grounded Theory
• Why?
• Great for analysing large qualitative data sets
• Developing research hypotheses and direction from little
understood domains
• Effectiveness when working with qualitative text or audio
data
• Provides a fuller understanding of employee energy use
practices
• Gives insight on employee interactions with their
organisation
• The „theory‟ is grounded in the data!
13. Grounded Theory
• First stage – Open Coding
• 631 codes grouped into 36 categories
• Codes at the granularity of word or sentence level:
“….hide the overall problem with metrics”
“senior management….” “rewards”
15. Grounded Theory
• Final stage – Selective Coding
• Illustrative participant quotes are selected to form a
narrative
• „Theory‟ is developed that brings together the axial code
categories
• Central theme selected – ‘Overall Responsibility’
Openness: “why am I doing
this who am I doing it for?”
Engagement: “you can kind of
reset the challenge by saying look
this is atrocious you’ve slipped by
60%, shame on you in a slightly
friendly way”.
16. Findings
• Developed Grounded Theory includes:
• Providing strong leadership and “management buy-in” to
ensure all departments and employees are part of the
initial outreach as well sustaining engagement long term.
• Promoting trust by ensuring that no part of the
organisational structure is exempt.
• Ensuring transparency so that the reasons behind the
intervention are clearly and openly communicated.
• Involving employees in setting energy consumption
targets
• Negotiating incentives mapped to any energy savings
made either at the departmental or organisational level.
17. Findings
• Contribution
• Transferable theory to design.
• Analysis relevant to HCI.
• Rich account of employee and management perspectives
of energy usage practices and how to design effective
interventions.
• Design of interventions must address corporate
responsibility
• Prototype interface that embeds developed grounded
theory.
19. Future Work
• Employee Energy Study
• Intervention built around open smart meter infrastructure
• Findings for design implications considered
• Multiple departmental recruitment
• Student Energy Study
• Socially mediated intervention using Facebook app
• Taps into contemporary „designing for coolness‟
In terms of the potential savings quoted, these numbers can be factored in with on-site visits from utilities companies to see where energy efficiencies can be improved.Majority of HCI research in reducing end-user energy demand (EUED) has been targeted at households.Some HCI work outside household contexts has been carried out; for example in student accommodation and workplaces, with the latter embryonic in nature.An important organisational study was carried out by Sieroet al 13 years ago in the domain of environmental psychology.Work in the non-academic domain has produced much grey literature and reports that attempt to provide sustainability guidelines for organisations and businesses – some overlap!There is still much to be done to developer a fuller understanding of designing and deploying workplace energy .
Our domestic work (Wattsup and Power Ballads) allowed us to understand the use of social media to engage householders on the topic of energy usage with others.Both papers showed good engagement with the applications.Only Wattsup measured power consumption.Power Ballads measured engagement levels through Google Analytics data and server logs.
Makes the point that there is scope to change people’s behaviour.People do make a difference despite the ‘baseline’ staying pretty much the same.
Workshops were designed to put employees needs and desires firstUser-centred design approach including participatory design and focus groupsShould hammer home the range of job roles participants represented, from admin to senior managementThe participants are INDICATIVE of a wide range of employees who would be targeted by interventions
This Wordlewas created from all the data from the Lincoln workshop – gives insightful ‘glance’ on the themes discussed.
Started workshop with survey followed by a discussion on it – survey included rating energy visualisations and open questions on their organisational energy consumption.Moved onto the intervention design stuff that included participatory design and focus groups.Wanted to capture all anecdotal accounts as well as the serious interplay/differences between employees and senior management.HUGE amount of data collected ~10 hours video, 10 hours of audio and written design accounts.
Deign task was really enjoyed by all participantsGiven drawing materials with A1 paper to design a 12 month energy interventionsThey could adopt technologies as they saw fit , for example near real-time smart meters, large displays, widgets etc.To stay focused and to keep designs relevant they were prompted at the start to think of:Recruitment strategiesEnergy feedbackSustaining beyond intervention
Examples of the intervention design tasks.
Grounded theory is great to provide an informed perspective little understood domainsQualitative so provides a rich account of the target demographic and their interactionsTherefore highly suited to the user-centred design approach
ALL the data audio/written accounts was transcribed into Nvivo – VERY time consumingFirst stage of open coding resulted in 631 codes sorted into 36 categoriesCodes are simply relevant and useful sentences or words
After the first sort we then group similarly themed codes (words/sentences) into tighter categoriesResulted in 6 categories:CommunicationVisualisationEngagementLeadership RoleOpennessIncentives
Final stage is where we develop our theory that ‘emerged’ from the data analysis.Our theory in this case is our design implications for organisational energy interventions.The theory also focusses on a central theme that emerged, in this case this is ‘Overall Responsibility’.The central theme means that everyone in an organisation needs to engage with the intervention, from top to bottom.The intervention itself must embed openness and gain the trust of the employees.
These are the important findings of our developed grounded theory; design implications.
The theory is transferred to a prototype GUI design.