SusLabNWE: Integrating qualitative and quantitative data to understand people’s everyday energy behavior
Dan Lockton, Flora Bowden, Greene, Catherine, Clare Brass, Rama Gheerawo · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2013
SusLabNWE: Integrating qualitative and quantitative data to understand people’s everyday energy behavior Dan Lockton, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, London Flora Bowden, SustainRCA, Royal College of Art, London Catherine Greene, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, London Clare Brass, SustainRCA, Royal College of Art, London Rama Gheerawo, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, London ABSTRACT Many approaches to design for energy use behavior change lump ‘energy demand’ together as something homogeneous, addressable primarily through quantitative feedback, rather than basing interventions on an understanding of why people use energy as they do. Our contention is that people don’t set out to ‘use energy’: its use is a side effect of solving everyday problems, meeting needs for comfort, light, cooking, cleaning, entertainment, and so on. Judicious integration of quantitative energy use data with qualitative insights from ethnographic research can allow a much more nuanced design approach. As part of SusLabNWE, a collaborative European project, we have been carrying out research with a diverse range of householders, investigating daily interactions with heating and lighting, meters and appliances—alongside people’s understanding of energy and how their actions affect its use. Insights, integrated with household monitoring data, are informing the co-design of prototype products and services to help people reduce their energy use while meeting needs. Introduction: design for sustainable behavior and the SusLabNWE project Design for behavior change—and, more specifically, design for sustainable behavior (e.g. Wever, 2012; Lockton et al, 2008)—has grown as significantly as a field over the past few years, part of design’s increasing concern with “ways of behaving” (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2007). Much of this relates to energy and other resource use (Froehlich et al, 2010), with a particular focus on designing better feedback systems (e.g. Selvefors et al, 2013) through user-centered design research and ethnographic engagement, in both domestic (e.g. Wilson, 2013) and workplace settings (e.g. Lockton et al, 2011, 2013a), bringing a design perspective into the same field as many government and commercial programs on smart metering and new forms of billing (e.g. Allcott & Rogers, 2013). At the Royal College of Art in London, two specialist design research centers—the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and SustainRCA—are partners in SusLabNWE (2012-15), an INTERREG - funded European collaboration between research organizations in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and UK. The overall theme of the project is reducing domestic energy use through behavior change, via designing and testing new products, services and interfaces—covering a broad scope of work and expertise, including environmental scientists, civil engineers and architects alongside design researchers. The project benefits from ‘Living Lab’ instrumented houses in each country, providing a platform (albeit artificial) for demonstrating and trialing the interventions developed, before they are deployed in people’s homes across north-west Europe for larger field trials (Keyson et al, 2013). In London, our Lab is a modern three-story townhouse being built by the Institute for Sustainability in the London Sustainable Industries Park, in Dagenham, Essex, with monitoring equipment installed by partners at Imperial College London. 2013 BECC Conference Sacramento CA