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Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

Consensus exists in much of industry and academia that engaging end-users is an essential element for improving energy efficiency in office buildings.We present our experiences implementing and deploying POEM (Personal Office Energy Monitor) with real office users. POEM is an end-user eco-feedback application. It provides detailed personalized data on energy usage and ambient conditions to each office user, as well as reporting aggregates for building-level management and policy setting. The POEM UI also allows users to state their subjective feeling of comfort. The system aggregates those inputs and informs the building manager to take corrective action if neededthus closing the control loop between the people and the building. We report our findings from pilot tests of POEM prototype.

Persistent urbanisation of our planet places a continuous strain on cities' resources and the quality of service delivery. While increasing city infrastructure might help alleviate this problem, the scale and complexity of future cities mean that this approach is unsustainable. Cities, however, are becoming increasingly instrumented with a myriad of sensors, both fixed and mobile. While a number of systems aim to exploit such sensors to gather information and to provide a real-time view of the city, existing approaches are application-specific, hindering their scalability and reuse. Using the city of Dublin (Ireland) as a testbed, this paper describes our iterative consultation process with city stakeholders to design CityWatch, an urban-scale data sensing and dissemination framework. In particular, it presents the resulting design of two prototype applications, the requirements on the overall framework, an initial implementation, and discusses the early results of ongoing trials.

Over the course of the next 10 years, the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to have a transformational effect on the everyday technologies which surround us. Access to the data produced by these devices opens an interesting space to practice discovery based learning. This paper outlines a participatory design approach taken to develop an IoT-based ecosystem which was deployed in 8 schools across England. In particular, we describe how we designed and developed the system and reflect on some of the early experiences of students and teachers. We found that schools were willing to adopt the IoT technology within certain bounds and we outline best practices uncovered when introducing technologies to schools.