A presentation on De Montfort University's work on energy dashboards and greening oct - presented originally as part of JISC Webinar series in conjunction with the EAUC Sustainability Exchange: One approach to reduce an organisation’s energy use is to engage your staff and students in these efforts. Many institutions have invested in energy dashboards and the like to show building users the amount of energy that a building is using and variations over different amounts of time. Not all these approaches work as well as others, however. This webinar will explore some of the understanding that has been gleaned from Jisc’s work with a number of universities, where approaches ranging from a socio-technical to the use of (serious) games have been deployed to tackle the energy use of university sites ranging from an engineering building (De Montfort University) to student residence (Coventry University). It will also introduce the soon to be released Jisc guide to this important aspect of improving environmental performance.

1. Lessons in engaging building users
Dr. Richard Bull

2. The invisibility of energy

3. By its nature, ‘energy’ is an
abstract and invisible force
that is conceptualised or
commonly defined in a
number of different ways, for
example as a commodity, as
a social necessity, as an
ecological resource, or as a
strategic material.*
* Burgess & Nye (2008), Re -materialising energy use through
transparent monitoring systems, Energy Policy

4. BEYOND INFORMATION PROVISION
•There is a need for a different approach- recognising the
complexity of user perceptions and understandings (Niemeyer,
Petts et al. 2005);
•Combining a bottom-up and top-down approach in order to
minimise mixed messages (Owens 2000);
• The value of public engagement (Burgess and Clark 2009;
Ockwell, Whitmarsh et al. 2009).
•The importance of context.

5. Two Greening ICT projects
Aim: To understand the role of ICT in
reducing energy consumption of a
large scale public building through the
design of an ICT interface connecting
building users to their electricity
consumption.
Aim: To design a smart phone and web
based application enabling building
users to understand the energy
consumption of the buildings across
DMU.

6. 1)
2)
3)

8. TWO CHALLENGES
1) Creative visualisations
2) Meaningful data

9. CREATIVE VISUALISATION
Healthy buildings = happy animals

10. WHAT IS NORMAL?
• Consumption (and normality) is dependent on ‘time of week’
• Most weeks are similar but all weeks are different
• It is possible to create a normal weekly profile

11. QUANTIFYING ENERGY
PERFORMANCE
• A building is happy when consumption is in the green zone
• A building is neutral when consumption is in the yellow zone
• A building is sad when consumption is in the red zone

12. LESSONS LEARNT
• Engaging users (findings from DUALL):
– Difficult to engage already busy staff
– Even harder to get on-line engagement
• Evaluation:
– Attributing behaviour change to such an intervention like Greenview is problematic
(nb. picking up small changes, & issue of occupancy for example)
– Without senior commitment and sincere staff engagement and collaboration mere
information provision in the form of dashboards is impotent.
• Creative, but not too creative!
– Users still found numerical and easily understood representations of energy useful –
especially in a Technology/Engineering building
– Users wanted guidance for users to help them behave differently with regard to
energy use (need for information provision).
– People want to compete!

13. WHAT’S NEXT?
•
•
•
Exploring the potential of social media in energy management:
Gooddee2ds: http://greenview.dmu.ac.uk/good-deeds
Exploring energy dashboards at a European level: Smartspaces:
http://smartspaces.dmu.ac.uk & http://www.smartspaces.eu/home/
Exploring energy dashboards and competition in University of Halls of
Residence (IEE proposal with NUS).

14. FURTHER READING
•
•
•
•
•
Brown, Bull et al (2012) Novel Instrumentation for Monitoring After-Hours Electricity
Consumption of Electrical Equipment, Energy and Buildings 47, p74-83.
Bull, R., Brown N., & Faruk, F. (2011) Findings from the DUALL Project: lessons in
engaging building users in energy reduction in a UK University. ECEEE 2011 Summer
Study: Energy efficiency first: The foundation of a low-carbon society.
Bull, R. Everitt, D., Stuart, G., Rieser, M. (2012) The Gorilla in the Library: Lessons in using
ICT to engage building users in energy reduction. Conference Proceedings from the second
Digital Economy ‘All Hands’ conference in Aberdeen, October 2012.
Bull, R., Irvine, K., Rieser, M., Fleming, P (2013). Are people the problem or the solution? A
critical look at the rise of the smart/intelligent building and the role of ICT enabled
engagement. ECEEE Summer Study Conference Proceedings 2013, pp. 1135-1145; 5A079-13
Stuart, G., Wilson, C., Bull, R. and Irvine, K. (2013) Designing live energy performance
feedback for public buildings in Leicester. ECEEE Summer Study Proceedings, 3-257-13

15. Thank you for listening.
Dr Richard Bull
rbull@dmu.ac.uk
greenview.dmu.ac.uk
Twitter: richbull