Situation Awareness and Home Energy Consumption Feedback

Reducing home energy consumption is a complex activity. In order to successfully complete it, home energy users must (at least) commit, plan, monitor and revise. In other domains (e.g., aviation, emergency response), devices supporting similarly complex activities have been shown to have multiple points of failure (including but not limited to failure to show key information, failure to present that information in an easily understood manner and failure to promote the projection of future results – e.g., Endsley 1992). Importantly, for our work on the ENLITEN project (an academic-industrial collaboration sponsored by the EPSRC) the identification of those failure points has been used as the basis for developing mitigation strategies, enhancing human-computer interaction and extending the support provided to home energy users. In this paper, we examine the applicability (or otherwise) of literature describing situation awareness failure in domains such as aviation, military operations and emergency response to home energy. We find the theoretical approach employed and the mitigations proposed to be a useful starting point for the extension and revision of home energy feedback devices.

More specifically, we consider domestic energy reduction from the perspective of situation awareness (SA). We report on a focus group study that investigates this SA. The participants in that focus group reported multiple under-researched SA issues in the home energy management domain, areas in which they identified additional information that would assist them as they committed to, planned, monitored and revised approaches to reducing their energy consumption.

The paper draws upon a multi-disciplinary research base (situation awareness, human-computer interaction, design science), investigates failures in home energy reduction and proposes concrete amendments to home energy feedback devices as a result. It contributes to discussions of home energy reduction and its impact on consumers' economic, health and sustainability concerns.