Understanding domestic energy consumption through interactive visualisation: a field study
Motivated by the need to better manage energy demand in the home, in this paper we advocate the integration into Ubi-comp systems of interactive energy consumption visualisa-tions, that allow users to engage with and understand their consumption data, relating it to concrete activities in their life. To this end, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of FigureEnergy, a novel interactive visualisation that allows users to annotate and manipulate a graphical rep-resentation of their own electricity consumption data, and therefore make sense of their past energy usage and under-stand when, how, and to what end, some amount of energy was used. To validate our design, we deployed FigureEn-ergy “in the wild ” – 12 participants installed meters in their homes and used the system for a period of two weeks. The results suggest that the annotation approach is successful overall: by engaging with the data users started to relate en-ergy consumption to activities rather than just to appliances. Moreover, they were able to discover that some appliances consume more than they expected, despite having had prior experience of using other electricity displays.