2. Introduction
• rel work: home energy sensing/feedback
• a “services” approach
• our study and findings
• advantages of the approach
3. Vignette 1
Enter A very warm Adrian Clear, fanning himself.
Adrian complains about the difficulties he has with keeping
cool. He’s been told he can save on heating bills by turning
the heating down by a few degrees. But, this conflicts with
his housemate’s preferences, and with the heating
installer’s advice to just leave the heating system to take
care of itself.
Exit Adrian, to find a refreshing drink or take a cold shower
4. indoor climate
• differing expectations of what is
comfortable, or normal
• negotiating with others that do not engage
with knowledges of resources
• specific meanings associated with keeping a
cosy house (Gram-Hanssen 2010)
• the role of competencies and expertise
5. Vignette 2
Enter Adrian Friday (to the MiB theme tune),
wearing a black suit and carrying a water
pistol and an iron
Adrian has finished killing aliens for the day, but is waiting
for his laundry to tumble-dry. He knows that tumble-drying
is energy-intensive, but he must do so frequently because
he’s too busy to line-dry, and his workplace has a strict
dress code and hygiene expectations.
Exit Adrian, to get back to his laundry
6. keeping up appearances
in a busy life
• social expectations dictate things like how
we need to look or smell, which has big
implications for daily practice (Shove 2003)
• powerful institutions (like employment)
• contribute to these expectations,
• tend to organise time in certain ways,
• ... making other ways of doing things
more difficult
7. Vignette 3
Enter Oliver Bates with a Powerbook 170, introduced as
an energy monitoring enthusiast by Mike.
Oliver has spent the last 21 years calibrating a complex
energy monitoring system so he can calculate exactly how
much energy each device he owns uses. However, Oliver’s
energy bill still hasn’t reduced much, partly because of his
guilty pleasure: he is a serial TV watcher and can only get
to sleep while [a boring crime show] plays in the
background.
Exit A tired Oliver to go and watch some TV
8. resource managers?
• negotiable: feedback can expose things
already seen as wasteful
• ...resulting changes tend to result in
savings of about 10% (Darby 2006)
• non-negotiable: external factors dictate the
possible range of actions, and which of
them are affordable/rewarding/valued
(Strengers 2011)
9. Vignette 4
Enter Janine, holding a candle.
Janine has turned the lights out, and is using 12.6 lumens
of candle power instead. She’s taking part in an energy
saving competition and has been in 2nd place for 3 weeks.
She’s just 0.5 kWh behind the leaders and has worked out
that if she uses candles 3 nights a week she can win the
competition. She hasn’t considered the environmental
impact of candles, but is sure they can help her win.
Exit Janine to check the competition web portal to see
how she’s doing
10. energy competitor
• resources and impacts are not as narrowly
defined as the feedback system implies
(Brynjarsdóttir et al. 2012)
• Sustainability is complicated!
11. Resource-centrism
• Our examples start with an awareness of
resources, then run into problems.
• If not resource-centrism, then what?
12. How does
consumption come
about?
"[R]elevant patterns of consumption
follow from efforts to provide and sustain
what people take to be normal services
like those of comfort and cleanliness"
Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience, p. 198
13. What is "service"?
• e.g. lighting, heating, food preparation
• services also support work and play at
home
• Thus, resources (energies) are just part of
the picture.
14. Participants and methods
• Four on-campus flats, 7-8 students each
• High-average and low-average, historically (variation)
• Twenty days (March 2011)
• Kitchen, corridor, two showers
• 22 private rooms monitored (out of 31)
• Sensing: per-socket mains electricity, binary
motion & light; camera over cooker/stove
• Experience sampling and 11 follow-up interviews
16. Lighting
• 16-29% of the energy in each flat
• bedrooms are comparable (~10 kWh)
• but communal areas more varied (46-85 kWh)
• A mix of conventions, expectations, meanings
and actions around the lighting in the flats
17. • Communal lights often left on
• But, corridor switchoffs in “Green”
• Navigation
• Meanings around comfort and security?
18. Entertainment and IT
• Big variation: 3.5% to 34% of the energy
• room inventories
• most had laptops; three PCs
• 9/12 male participants had extra audio,
video, or gaming devices
• A room’s energy attribution corresponded
roughly to its inventory.
19. Computing
• discrete periods of use, vs. consistently on
• laptops vs. other: order of magnitude less
• Blue: two server PCs; four with AV/gaming
• differing conventions for power
management (Chetty, Brush et al. 2009)
20. IT: one service to rule
them all?
• multi-purpose: looking up lecture notes,
doing coursework, listening to music,
reading the news, keeping in touch with
friends
• significant overlap of these activities
• challenges in attributing which practices a
service supports
21. Systems of devices
• multiple devices clustered together
• e.g.“computer” a bunch of devices served by
two sockets
• supporting a service like gaming or watching
TV
• often makes sense to bundle the energy of
these devices, and attribute to a single
service, like entertainment
22. Entertainment
• socialising: casual and planned group
activites
• access to digital media infrastructures
• boredom and filling time has resource
implications
23. Advantages of a service-
oriented approach
1. exposes service-reliance across areas of
practice
2. identifies systems of devices and constellations
of services
3. resource measurements can be actioned more
effectively, taken in context
4. facilitates higher-level reconsideration of how
service might be reconfigured for sustainability
24. Summary
• the “services” approach is really about
designing sustainability research to take the
broader view that it needs
• far-reaching implications; scalability
• because of the nature of variation, formative
studies are always needed
• develop qualitative/quantitative
understandings, and in designing interventions
