Design of eco-feedback has primarily aimed at persuading individuals to change behaviours into more environmentally sustainable ones. However, it has been questioned how effective such feedback is in supporting long-term change. As an alternative focus for energy feedback, we present a case study of amateur energy management work in apartment buildings owned by housing cooperatives, and the design of an app that aims to stimulate and support cooperatives in taking energy actions that significantly reduce the cooperative's collective energy use. By linking energy data to energy actions, the users can see how actions taken in their own and other cooperatives affected the energy use, learn from each other's experiences and become motivated as energy amateurs. Based on our housing cooperative case, we reflect on design aspects to consider when designing for energy management in amateur settings.

No abstract

Model Based User Interface Development offers the possibility to design User Interfaces without being concerned about the underlying implementation. This is achieved by devising models at a high level of abstraction, thus creating the potential for involving users or domain experts to achieve a user-centered design process. Obtaining a running interactive application from such models usually requires several model transformations. One of the current problems is that while a user interface is generated after these transformations, other parts of the interactive system such as the application logic need to pre-exist or they must be written manually before the interface can be tested in a realistic scenario. This leaves the domain experts dependent on programmers and increases the time between iterations. In this paper we work with Query Annotations, which were previously used only for modeling at low levels and for generating fully functional interfaces, and we aim to generalize them for the high-level modeling approach called Discourse Modeling. The direct expected benefit of this generalization is the possibility to generate complete, readily testable interactive prototypes, rather than just their user interfaces. In addition, Query Annotations can serve as the mapping between the various levels of abstraction and bring to the domain experts a better understanding of the transformation process, as well as the possibility to modify the interfaces and models directly.

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles. We thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. While some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.