Design Visions for Future Energy Systems: Towards Aligning Developers’ Assumptions and Householders’ Expectations

Abstract

We increasingly see smart energy technology moving into peoples' homes, designed to support householders in strategically managing different forms of energy conservation. Often, design visions for such technologies assume householders will accept smart energy systems as long as the interaction remains effortless, efficient, and convenient. Likewise, developers rely on assumptions that smart energy technologies meeting such usability goals may urge householders to become active players in a future energy market. Yet, a growing body of HCI research illustrates that actively engaging people with sustainability issues through technology requires more than merely meeting usability goals. Against this backdrop, our study investigates the design vision of a cutting-edge home energy management system created as part of an EU project and householders' expectations of it. Our findings highlight (mis)alignments that emerged from a questionnaire study with 167 households participating in a field trial of the developed technology. We use the insights to discuss the alignment of sustainable visions, HCI, and the design of future energy systems.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

Supporting Solar Energy Coordination among Communities

“…Indeed, past research has consistently documented the negative implications of designing sustainability technologies without user participation (e.g. most recently [28]). Still, while our participants were keen to make coordination work, they were also in consensus that energy communities will be challenging to coordinate outside of groups of like-minded participants like themselves.…”

The Character of Eco-feedback Systems for Energy Communities

“…Although we are only starting to see the concept of energy communities being explored [6,29,31,32,61,63], we can still categorise these according to how they produce renewable energy (production), who is going to benefit from this energy and how (consumption), what are the motivations for joining an energy community (purpose), and which actors take part (participants).…”

“…The purpose of these emerging EU energy communities is to produce and distribute renewable energy for local citizens to consume [8]. While the vision of energy communities is still in a formative stage, it seems that members of such organisations will require a high level of digitalisation to organise the production, distribution and consumption of renewable energy as a collective [6,29,63].…”

Exploring Values of Energy Justice: A Case Study of a Burgeoning Energy Community

“…With energy communities envisioned to play a favorable role in sustainable energy transitions [15,48], assumed benefits include minimizing CO 2 -emissions, improving social cohesion, and energy bill savings [20]. Although energy communities are gaining political and societal traction, how these are to be organized, implemented, and supported by technology is still in a formative stage [29,34,46,68]. One way to organize energy communities is to envision energy communities as cooperatives where members own energy technologies and surpluses distributed in the community [30].…”

“…In HCI, we are recently starting to see work that explores the design of digital platforms supporting different forms of energy communities [10,19,22,23,37]. However, much of this research focuses on demonstrations or speculations of how energy communities may be supported by the design of interactive and innovative technology [7,34,68,70]. Further, as technological infrastructures become embedded into social structures, how these technologies support communities in sustainable transitions is mostly shaped through trial-and-error [31,34].…”