Tom A. Rodden
Joel E. Fischer
Nadia Pantidi
ABSTRACT
Energy systems researchers are proposing a broad range of future "smart" energy infrastructures to promote more efficient management of energy resources. This paper considers how consumers might relate to these future smart grids within the UK. To address this challenge we exploited a combination of demonstration and animated sketches to convey the nature of a future smart energy infrastructure based on software agents. Users' reactions suggested that although they felt an obligation to engage with energy issues, they were principally disinterested. Users showed a considerable lack of trust in energy companies raising a dilemma of design. While users might welcome agents to help in engaging with complex energy infrastructures, they had little faith in those that might provide them. This suggests the need to consider how to design software agents to enhance trust in these socio-economic settings.
- Brynjarsdottir, H., Håkansson, M., Pierce, J., Baumer, E., DiSalvo, C., and Sengers, P. Sustainably unpersuaded: how persuasion narrows our vision of sustainability. Proc. CHI '12, ACM Press (2012), 947--956. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Buxton, B. Sketching User Experiences. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 2007.Google Scholar
- Chetty, M., Sung, J.-Y., and Grinter, R. E. How smart homes learn: the evolution of the networked home and household. Proc. UbiComp '07, Springer (2007). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dept. of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OfGEM). Smart Metering Implementation Programme. 2011.Google Scholar
- DiSalvo, C. and Sengers, P. Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI. Proc. CHI '10, ACM Press (2010), 1975--1984. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dourish, P., Button. G. On "Technomethodology": foundational relationships between ethnomethodology and system design. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 13, 4 (1998), 395--432. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dourish, P. HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics. Proc. DIS '10, ACM Press (2010), 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Forlizzi, J. and DiSalvo, C. Microsketching: creating components of complex interactive products and systems. Proc. C&C '09, ACM Press (2009), 87--96. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Froehlich, J. and Findlater, L. The design of ecofeedback technology. Proc. CHI '10, ACM Press (2010), 1999--2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kensing, F. and Madsen, K. H. Generating visions: future workshops and metaphorical design. In J. Greenbaum and M. Kyng, eds., Design at work cooperative design of computer systems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1991), 155--168. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kitzinger. J. Introducing focus groups. BMJ, 311 (1995), 299--302.Google ScholarCross Ref
- MacKay, D. J. Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air. UIT Cambridge Ltd., Cambridge, 2009.Google Scholar
- Mancini, C., Rogers, Y., Bandara, A. K., Coe, T., Jedrzejczyk, L., Joinson, A. N., Price, B. A., Thomas, K. and Nuseibeh., B. Contravision: exploring users' reactions to futuristic technology. Proc. CHI '10, ACM Press (2010), 153--162. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pierce, J. and Paulos, E. Beyond energy monitors: interaction, energy, and emerging energy systems. Proc. CHI '12, ACM Press (2012), 665--674. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ramchurn, S. D., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A., and Jennings, N. R. Agent-Based Homeostatic Control for Green Energy in the Smart Grid. ACM Trans. on Intell. Sys. and Tech. 2, 4 Article 35 (2011). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ramchurn, S. D., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A., and Jennings, N. R. Putting the 'smarts' into the smart grid. Communications of the ACM 55, 4 (2012). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reeves, S. Envisioning ubiquitous computing. Proc. CHI '12, ACM Press (2012), 1573--1582. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Scott, J., Brush, A. J. B., Krumm, J., et al. PreHeat: Controlling Home Heating Using Occupancy Prediction. Proc. UbiComp '11, Springer (2011). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shove, E. Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change. Environment and Planning 42, 6 (2010), 1273--1285.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Smart Metering Design Group. Industry's Draft Technical Specification. Smart Metering Implementation Programme, 2011.Google Scholar
- Spees, K. and Lave, L. Impacts of Responsive Load in PJM: Load Shifting and Real Time Pricing. Energy Journal 29, 2 (2008) 101--123.Google Scholar
- Star, S. L. The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioural Scientist 43, 3 (1999), 377--391.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Taylor, A. S, Harper, R., Swan, L., Izadi, S., Sellen, A., Perry. M. Homes that make us smart. Personal Ubiquitous Computing 11, 5 (2007), 383--393. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tohidi, M., Buxton, W., Baecker, R., and Sellen, A. User sketches: A Quick, Inexpensive, and Effective way to Elicit More Reflective User Feedback. Proc. NordiCHI '06, ACM Press (2006), 105--114. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tomlinson, B., Silberman, M. S., & White, J. Can More Efficient IT Be Worse for the Environment? Computer 44, 1 (2011), 87--89. Google ScholarDigital Library
- US Dept. of Energy. Benefits of demand response in electricity markets and recommendations for achieving them. 2006.Google Scholar
- Zimmerman, J. Video Sketches: Exploring Pervasive Computing Interaction Designs. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 4, 4 (2005), 91--94. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- At home with agents: exploring attitudes towards future smart energy infrastructures
Recommendations
A Home Energy Management System for Energy-Efficient Smart Homes
CSCI '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence - Volume 02As the carbon dioxide emission and global warming become the world serious issues, many researches are performed to reduce the energy consumption. Therefore, there are many new devices for energy saving scheme in the smart home area, such as smart plug, ...
Development of Robotic Care for Older Adults with Dementia: Focus Group and Survey Study
Social RoboticsAbstractThe number of people with dementia has been growing worldwide. The cognitive deficits in people with dementia usually lead to lower independence and quality of life. Socially assistive robots (SARs) have demonstrated potential to assist dementia ...
Recruiting Older Adults in the Wild: Reflections on Challenges and Lessons Learned from Research Experience
PervasiveHealth '18: Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for HealthcareIt is important to understand the older adults prior to the design process. The understanding can better facilitate design conversations between the researchers and the older adults. In this paper, we discussed our experiences of building a relationship ...
Reviews
Debraj De
Smart grids are quickly becoming important in the redesign of the energy generation-distribution framework, intended to increase efficiency, robustness, adaptability, and environmental friendliness. Energy system researchers and companies are proposing a variety of designs and architectures for future smart energy infrastructures. However, the study of general users and consumers has shown a lack of trust and acceptance, especially with respect to energy providers. Based on these observations, the authors of this paper have used human-computer interaction (HCI) approaches to design demonstrations and animated sketches that convey information about future smart energy infrastructures. The goal is to present the future infrastructures to consumers in a socioeconomic context, to enhance trust in the energy providers and in the smart grid developments. The work offers two main contributions: (1) exploration and analysis of the attitudes of UK "energy consumers" concerning future smart energy infrastructures, such as smart meters, embedded software agents at home and in the grid, and energy networks; and (2) demonstrations that prove the effectiveness of whiteboard animations to convey the smart energy infrastructures and solicit views from users. The authors focus on the lack of trust between energy consumers and providers, and propose HCI-based designs for software agents that can help mitigate the problem. To do this, the study considered three main research questions: (1) consumer response to and acceptance of the software agent's autonomy and control; (2) consumer trust of active energy infrastructure; and (3) privacy concerns in energy monitoring. The authors developed animated sketches to describe and demonstrate the energy infrastructure to consumers. These sketches are disposable, minimalist, exploratory, and ambiguous. The animated sketches consist of three parts with pauses in between. The first part portrays the current state of the world, the second projects the state into the near future, and the third looks further into the future. The current state of the world includes a meter-based energy-charging model, off-the-shelf electricity-monitoring devices, electricity consumption data in the cloud, and peak leveling. The near future highlights smart meters, dynamic pricing, and software agents. The paper then presents a study and feedback from focus groups on the key issues. Based on this feedback, the authors suggest four key design principles for designing the software agents and the smart energy infrastructures. Overall, this paper is worth reading for the study of user attitudes toward smart grids and software agents in the UK. The proposed HCI-based intentionally structured, animated sketches and the resulting feedback are valuable research outcomes. The paper is recommended for audiences interested in smart grids and related socioeconomic and political issues. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments