JISC Energy dashboards event in Oxford on 14th June 2011

Our project team worked with the JISC to organise a meeting for people interested in "Energy Dashboards". In the morning our project team ran a workshop to try to help people design creative ways to use technology to change social norms with respect to energy use. Participants were asked to focus on three scenarios: (a) moving from very low efficiency to much more efficient situation (b) what to do when efficiency improvements stop (c) what to do if efficiency worsens. We gathered the ideas from the 50+ people who attended and will add them to data we gathered from the Oxford and Lincoln workshops. After lunch speakers from other organisations presented their approaches. On reflection there seems to be two main approaches to promoting behaviour change: command control vs bottom up. We tend to think of our approach as "middling-out" - getting institutional managers and grass roots activists working closely together but this is perhaps mere semantics. Some of us went to a local pub afterwards and had a BBQ. We planned putting the world to right by discussing the real dragons of inaction (see table 1 taken from The Dragons of Inaction, Psychological Barriers That Limit Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Robert Gifford, University of Victoria). (There are also some pictures of the debates below!)