Accounting for Energy-reliant Services within Everyday Life at Home, Pervasive 2012, Newcastle

Accounting forEnergy-Reliant Services

within Everyday Life at HomeOliver Bates, Adrian K. Clear, Adrian Friday,

Mike Hazas, and Janine Morley

Lancaster University

Introduction

• rel work: home energy sensing/feedback

• a “services” approach

• our study and findings

• advantages of the approach

Vignette 1

Enter A very warm Adrian Clear, fanning himself.

Adrian complains about the difficulties he has with keeping cool. He’s been told he can save on heating bills by turning the heating down by a few degrees. But, this conflicts with his housemate’s preferences, and with the heating installer’s advice to just leave the heating system to take care of itself.

Exit Adrian, to find a refreshing drink or take a cold shower

indoor climate

• differing expectations of what is comfortable, or normal

• negotiating with others that do not engage with knowledges of resources

• specific meanings associated with keeping a cosy house (Gram-Hanssen 2010)

• the role of competencies and expertise

Vignette 2

Enter Adrian Friday (to the MiB theme tune), wearing a black suit and carrying a water pistol and an iron

Adrian has finished killing aliens for the day, but is waiting for his laundry to tumble-dry. He knows that tumble-drying is energy-intensive, but he must do so frequently because he’s too busy to line-dry, and his workplace has a strict dress code and hygiene expectations.

Exit Adrian, to get back to his laundry

keeping up appearances in a busy life

• social expectations dictate things like how we need to look or smell, which has big implications for daily practice (Shove 2003)

• powerful institutions (like employment)

• contribute to these expectations,

• tend to organise time in certain ways,

• ... making other ways of doing things more difficult

Vignette 3

Enter Oliver Bates with a Powerbook 170, introduced as an energy monitoring enthusiast by Mike.

Oliver has spent the last 21 years calibrating a complex energy monitoring system so he can calculate exactly how much energy each device he owns uses. However, Oliver’s energy bill still hasn’t reduced much, partly because of his guilty pleasure: he is a serial TV watcher and can only get to sleep while [a boring crime show] plays in the background.

Exit A tired Oliver to go and watch some TV

resource managers?

• negotiable: feedback can expose things already seen as wasteful

• ...resulting changes tend to result in savings of about 10% (Darby 2006)

• non-negotiable: external factors dictate the possible range of actions, and which of them are affordable/rewarding/valued (Strengers 2011)

Vignette 4

Enter Janine, holding a candle.

Janine has turned the lights out, and is using 12.6 lumens of candle power instead. She’s taking part in an energy saving competition and has been in 2nd place for 3 weeks. She’s just 0.5 kWh behind the leaders and has worked out that if she uses candles 3 nights a week she can win the competition. She hasn’t considered the environmental impact of candles, but is sure they can help her win.

Exit Janine to check the competition web portal to see how she’s doing

energy competitor

• resources and impacts are not as narrowly defined as the feedback system implies (Brynjarsdóttir et al. 2012)

• Sustainability is complicated!

Resource-centrism

• Our examples start with an awareness of resources, then run into problems.

• If not resource-centrism, then what?

How does consumption come

about?"[R]elevant patterns of consumption

follow from efforts to provide and sustain what people take to be normal services like those of comfort and cleanliness"

Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience, p. 198

What is "service"?

• e.g. lighting, heating, food preparation

• services also support work and play at home

• Thus, resources (energies) are just part of the picture.

Participants and methods• Four on-campus flats, 7-8 students each

• High-average and low-average, historically (variation)

• Twenty days (March 2011)

• Kitchen, corridor, two showers

• 22 private rooms monitored (out of 31)

• Sensing: per-socket mains electricity, binary motion & light; camera over cooker/stove

• Experience sampling and 11 follow-up interviews

See paper

Lighting

• 16-29% of the energy in each flat

• bedrooms are comparable (~10 kWh)

• but communal areas more varied (46-85 kWh)

• A mix of conventions, expectations, meanings and actions around the lighting in the flats

• Communal lights often left on

• But, corridor switchoffs in “Green”

• Navigation

• Meanings around comfort and security?

Entertainment and IT

• Big variation: 3.5% to 34% of the energy

• room inventories

• most had laptops; three PCs

• 9/12 male participants had extra audio, video, or gaming devices

• A room’s energy attribution corresponded roughly to its inventory.

Computing

• discrete periods of use, vs. consistently on

• laptops vs. other: order of magnitude less

• Blue: two server PCs; four with AV/gaming

• differing conventions for power management (Chetty, Brush et al. 2009)

IT: one service to rule them all?

• multi-purpose: looking up lecture notes, doing coursework, listening to music, reading the news, keeping in touch with friends

• significant overlap of these activities

• challenges in attributing which practices a service supports

Systems of devices

• multiple devices clustered together

• e.g. “computer” a bunch of devices served by two sockets

• supporting a service like gaming or watching TV

• often makes sense to bundle the energy of these devices, and attribute to a single service, like entertainment

Entertainment

• socialising: casual and planned group activites

• access to digital media infrastructures

• boredom and filling time has resource implications

Advantages of a service-oriented approach

1. exposes service-reliance across areas of practice

2. identifies systems of devices and constellations of services

3. resource measurements can be actioned more effectively, taken in context

4. facilitates higher-level reconsideration of how service might be reconfigured for sustainability

Summary

• the “services” approach is really about designing sustainability research to take the broader view that it needs

• far-reaching implications; scalability

• because of the nature of variation, formative studies are always needed

• develop qualitative/quantitative understandings, and in designing interventions