Making it Obvious: Designing Feedback into Energy Consumption
The process of giving feedback on consumption motivates consumers to save energy through reduced waste, yet the body of evidence testifying to this is rarely acted upon in any systematic way. The paper reviews the literature on the effectiveness of three
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Making it Obvious: Designing Feedback into Energy Consumption Sarah Darby Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
Abstract. The process of giving feedback on consumption motivates consumers to save energy through reduced waste, yet the body of evidence testifying to this is rarely acted upon in any systematic way. The paper reviews the literature on the effectiveness of three types of feedback to domestic consumers: direct feedback in the home, indirect feedback via billing and 'inadvertent' feedback (a by-product of technical, household or social changes). The lessons learned on the importance of clear, immediate and user-specific information are then applied in a survey of the opportunities for better feedback to consumers in terms of technology, design and location of meters and display panels, energy billing and services such as audits and advice programmes.
The paper concludes that feedback has a significant role to play in raising energy awareness and in bringing about reduced consumption of the order of 10%; and that opportunities exist for designing it into energy-related systems which have yet to be realised.
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Introduction
While some aspects of energy usage may be highly visible, domestic energy consumption as such is largely hidden from view. This 'invisibility' hampers our ability to learn about how to use energy more intelligently and less wastefully. Evidence from the survey of implementation of the EU directive on labelling of cold appliances in the EU indicates that 'the message about energy saving and the environment has been noted by consumers in every country', but that few actually link the importance of energy saving to their own personal behaviour (Winward et aI, 1998). 'Noting' a message is clearly not enough to spur people to action: much work remains to be done to build on a low level of awareness of a need to save energy, by developing peoples' ability to identify what can be done in specific terms to improve the situation. This paper begins an investigation into the extent to which householders can teach themselves about energy usage in the way in which they teach themselves about so
P. Bertoldi et al. (eds.) , Energy Efficiency in Househould Appliances and Lighting © Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg 2001
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many other things: by using feedback signals from their own actions and their own consumption.
2
Conceptualising Energy
How do we think of energy? At the level of the individual consumer, in three main ways: as a commodity, a social necessity and an ecological resource (though see Sheldrick and Macgill, 1988, for a fuller account). All of these suggest ways of making consumption more visible, while pointing to shortcomings in policy and practice aimed at carbon reductions. 1. Energy is a commodity: much policy is based on this conception. With the liberalisation of utilities, customers have become more aware of fuel price, but most only have fleeting contact with the financial cost of their energy services, when they receive a bill or bank statement or if
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