HEURISTICS FOR DESIGNING SUSTAINABLE ENERGY DASHBOARDS
Howard Noble, David White, Joss Winn, Derek Foster, David Blach, Ken Kahn, Richard Hall, Richard Bull
Correspondence to Howard Noble: mailto:howard.noble@it.ox.ac.uk
The project team would like to thank the JISC Greening ICT Programme team and Rob Bristow and Peter James in particular. We would also like to thank: Derek Foster for helping out at the workshops, contributing with great ideas and suggesting papers we should read. Alex Dutton for his work on data.ox.ac.uk (Oxford's open data store) and general enthusiasm and practical endeavor. Josie Fraser for numerous introductions to people and groups and for opening our eyes to the potential of open meter data and energy literacy in schools. Arthur Hjorth for putting us onto the work of Elinor Ostrom and generally helping with the big ideas.
Institutional managers can try to reduce energy use in the background. They can install technology that automatically powers down lights and computers and try to steer procurement towards energy-efficient equipment. However, very few changes can be implemented without resistance, and before long managers will need to ask employees to contribute.
Behavior change initiatives must overcome sizable hurdles if they are to deliver:
It is difficult to persuade employees to keep doing the little things that together add up to huge savings. For example if we all turned off idle PCs every night the savings would be huge. The trouble is we do not think about savings collectively, we think in terms of our own individual effort. Turning a PC off overnight would save about £0.14 (14 hours x 0.100kW x 10p/kWh) which is hardly motivating at home, let alone at work where we don't even see the bill.
As consumers we envisage energy as both a private and public good. We demand that energy is as cheap as air so that we don't have to think about consuming it. We also become very private and obstructive when asked how much energy we consume and what we use it for. This double standard ensures that we continue to treat greenhouse gases and the cost of the wars we fight to secure access to hydrocarbons externalities (as an economist might put it).
Institutional managers and politicians who are interested in climate change share a common problem - they lack a mandate.
William Jevons noted that technological advancements that result in improved efficiency (referring to coal) tend to increase rather than decrease the rate of consumption of that resource. The Rebound Effect predicts that even if we manage to tame our desire for a specific resource we will often spend savings on other resource-intensive activities e.g. use money saved on utility bills to buy extra flights. Whilst there is considerable debate surrounding the rebound effect it seems reasonable to say that improved energy efficiency does not necessarily reduce overall consumption.
To be sure efficiency leads to more sustainable consumption we need to measure resource use across the spectrum. In particular we need to include the environmental footprint associated with products we buy in from India and China as our own. Price is a very useful lever for controlling how much we consume collectively and we have been trained to take a great deal of notice wherever we are. It is also clear that we live in consumerist and growth obsessed cultures where prices are set to encourage ever more demand.
We are not accustomed to considering environmental indicators when we make everyday decisions. Most people do not understand what a kWh is, have no idea how much energy everyday electrical devices consume, and baulk at the idea that it is necessary to consider the environmental footprint associated with manufactured goods.
Encouraging people to contribute to sustainable energy initiatives by appealing to their understanding of climate change science is equally fraught. Psychologists have a depressingly detailed understanding of the psychological and social barriers that prevent this approach from working. The table below is copied from the excellent summary paper by Robert Gifford (see below):
Dragons of Inaction: Psychological Barriers That Limit Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Robert Gifford, University of Victoria. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/66/4/290.html
Our consumer behaviours are largely shaped by the people around us - we are social animals who find it difficult to make rational decisions. Consider the following thought experiment:
A population is composed of 3 groups: 50% take their consumption patterns from the people nearest them, 30% consume to their heart's content, 20% are are reducing their energy consumption. Over time, will energy consumption reduce, stay the same or increase?
It seems plausible to suggest that energy consumption will increase to close to the level of the 30%. Despite the actions of the 20% a minority group will find it difficult to prevail, especially if their agenda is unpopular (saving energy is not fun). The 30% will therefore influence the 50% more than the 20%. To compound this dynamic the 20% may then feel deflated enough to revert to the evolving norm.
Our solution focuses on the use of freely available on-line tools to support institutional behaviour change initiatives. We draw on the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom who spent over 30 years studying how some communities have successfully managed to appropriate common pool resources (fresh water, fish and wood from a forest) and avoid a tragedy of the commons. She created a set of design principles to help groups build sustainable communities:
Cox, M., G. Arnold, and S. Villamayor Tomás. 2010. A review of design principles for community-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society 15(4): 38. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/.
Elinor Ostrom. 1990. Governing the Commons - The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. (See pp 88-102 for design principles).
We argue groups should structure their activities around two principles:
And use these heuristics to guide the selection and use of on-line tools:
The prototype below illustrates how we have used the two key principles and heuristics to create a sustainable energy dashboard, it is composed of the following elements:
We all have cheap and easy access to a wealth of well-designed tools that we can appropriate to build sustainability dashboards. For example:
Not all groups will have the IT skills necessary to create their own dashboards. We envisage an iGoogle-like platform that helps groups build fairly generic dashboards from a small set of widgets:
We asked for funding for this project because we were very skeptical about two popular ideas in this area of inquiry:
We asked for funding to:
Our hunch was that we can draw on online game research to find ways to motivate people to tackle complex tasks. Online game designers are particularly good at representing quantitative measures of performance as qualitative indicators of social capital. In other words, getting people to slay dragons so they can be rewarded with points/badges they can show off. We set out to ask whether similar similar techniques could be used to help people cooperate on slaying a different set of dragons.
Changes:
Research
We wanted to read as widely as possible around the main questions that underpinned the project. This helped to design the workshops and arrive at the final set of heuristics. Please see reading list in appendix A
Workshops
The workshops were composed of three sections:
10-15 participants attended each of the first two workshops (Oxford and Lincoln) and 50 people took part in a third shortened workshop convened by the JISC Greening ICT programme. See appendix B for more details.
Prototype
Take ideas from academic research and the workshop data to create heuristics and a prototype energy efficiency dashboard.
The main deliverable at the start of the project was the workshop (see appendix B ). To design the survey we had to quickly ascertain what questions we wanted to ask workshop participants, and what we could realistically do with a survey. We decided to focus on:
With research papers and workshop data to hand we then went through a brainstorming phase to arrive at the heuristics and prototype internet use patterns.
We wanted to demonstrate our ideas by building an open data store and showing how it can be used to visualise data in compelling ways. We built two connectors to scrape data from an Ion Enterprise web server and the Scottish and Southern Energy billing database. Whilst the connectors work and we have a pilot service (http://data.ox.ac.uk/explore/openmeters/) we have not had time to create a robust solution - if the the data providers change their systems the connectors will break.
We then set about exploring how easy it is to visualise university meter data using Processing.org and by implementing a Google gadget. We managed to create very simple implementations but we didn't get far enough to share code other groups could use. We are satisfied however that these are two of the better approaches for creating interesting visualisations: Processing.org for coders and Google Docs spreadsheets for everyone else.
We spent quite a bit of time deliberating on the surprisingly complicated subject of how to set targets. There are at least two main considerations when setting targets: (1) their ongoing psychological influence and (2) how easily they are to implement. For instance, it might be easy to understand and implement a target that is simply 5% reduction on the reading at the same time the previous year, complications may well arise: (a) what does it mean to the target if more people start using the building, (b) what will happen to psychological impact performance against the 5% target once the easy efficiency gains are achieved, (c) how will the equation that calculates the absolute target at any moment cope with missing data, (d) how to go about calculating a projected performance against a target in real-time.
The main underlying problem has been that electricity meter data is seen as being owned by energy utility providers and service providers who create applications for institutional energy managers. In both cases, the data has never been seen as something that should be freely available for others to use as they please. This creates significant problems for groups that want to take ownership of an energy efficiency initiative as they will find it difficult to understand energy and report on performance.
We presented a paper titled Open Meter Data to the most senior committees at the University of Oxford and there was unanimous agreement that it was desirable that electricity data should be freely and openly available on the web. Unfortunately there is still a significant amount of technical work to make this a viable option. It is also apparent there are considerable political issues in terms of persuading groups who have hitherto believed they own the data to relinquish control. The main points we made in the paper were:
After the end of the project we worked with Oxford Brookes University to submit a proposal to the EPSRC to run an action research project that would use the heuristics to improve energy efficiency in a range of public buildings. Although unsuccessful it was a valuable exercise in terms of sharing and improving the ideas.
The main outputs and results for this project are:
We have focused on describing heuristics and internet use patterns to help groups re-envisage energy as a common pool resource. We argue that we need to shift the focus of energy dashboards away from being simply an information display, towards being a community building tool. Elinor Ostrom research convinces us that there is a lot more to avoiding a tragedy of the commons than monitoring resource appropriation. Real change comes when individuals form groups and take ownership of a problem. Group members agree rules and sanctions and sufficient levels of trust that a minimal amount of conflict resolution needs to happen.
We have a long way to go. Most people still think energy is either an invisible or cheap private good. It seems almost blasphemous to suggest that we fight wars to secure energy supply or even that energy use results in pollution. The evidence suggests otherwise of course, but if we are to believe psychological research we should not be surprised: cognitive dissonance is a distinctly human trait.
Energy underpins everything we do, the change we need to make is immense and it is unlikely we will solve it with technology alone. We need leaders but leaders need mandates. We recommend acting collectively now so that we can learn hands-on what needs doing and which leaders to select.
The next phase of this line of inquiry is to conduct action research to:
Behaviour change:
Politics, philosophy and economics:
You can download the survey questions, visualisations participants looked at when completing the first part of the survey, and the final survey data.
In the second part of the session we ran a game where participants were given 10 sweets and asked to contribute some to a central bank each round. The amount contributed was increased by a small percentage and divided equally amongst the players. At the end of the game everyone revealed how many sweets they had amassed - those that had 'cheated' by giving little and received the benefits of the cooperative bahaviour of others would be the richest.
In the third and final part of the session we opened up the discussion to wider topics such as whether energy could be seen as a common pool resource, attitudes towards targets, and the Rebound Effect.
In summary, we learnt the following from the workshops: