It’s been a busy and extremely productive two weeks for us. We had a milestone in the thesis process to present research, insights and the opportunities we have identified from both primary and secondary research (that Hugo will write about). The interviews we did with users was very revealing about people’s automatic behaviors and their perceptions of energy consumption and the companies that are involved. This gives us a lot of ammo to go full blast into the next phase of the thesis: where we actually design some stuff!
We had the opportunity of working with the extremely talented Philip Keller (a fellow gradID-er). He came in with a set of tools to help us get to the real value we were trying to provide. Together, we generated about 80 tag lines for preservenergy in an effort to get to our value criteria for the final design solution that we come up with. Here are the ones we finally boiled down to after the session. We will keep refining this as we go along, but in terms of experience, these are the intangibles we would like to hit. Phil came in with an outsider’s perspective and it helped us distill what we have been talking about amongst each other. He is immensely gifted as a moderator and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with him. We look forward to working with him in the future.
Moving on to the interviews we conducted, we used a method that Katherine Bennett taught us in our design research classes – Laddering. It is a technique by which you ask questions based on what people say in order to get to the motivations and emotions behind what people say. Also, this helps bring out contradictions in things people say, because it’s what they do that’s more important that what they say they do. We try very hard to also keep the interview completely unbiased, so that our personal biases towards the project do not affect what our interviewees say. Our user group consists of two families and two individuals for our first phase.
We used the card deck we created to encourage conversation about various topics related to the topic we are dealing with and laddered in on their answers to get some really valuable insights that we will use to inform a better design solution. Now, from all these interviews come interesting findings. There are some that overlap amongst different participants and some are patterns that we discover after analyzing the transcripts. To help us visualize all this vast amounts of information, we used the KJ Method. This tool basically allows us to find patterns amongst our observations and see what insights can be derived.
You can see the entire version of the wall in high resolution by clicking on the thumbnail above. The survey that we sent out was quite successful as well. 123 responses so far and counting. Thanks to all those who filled it in and shared it. Here’s a snapshot of what it looks like now.
Based on the insights we derived, we brainstormed on the opportunities we could create and presented them in our Week 9 milestone.
We want to make this project as collaborative as possible. It would be awesome if you can fill in the survey below and share it with your friends using the link – http://bit.ly/preservenergysurvey
Following the introduction from our teacher Krystina Castella, we met with Frederic Feltcher at Burbank Water and Power. Meeting with an expert that has more than 30 years of experience in the utilities industry and one of the smart grid pioneers does not happen everyday. Fred gave us very valuable input from the utility company side both for electricity and water. This point of view from the utility company side enriches the findings we have been collecting through our research from consumers, startups, technologists, and designers. These are some of the key findings from the interview we had with him and his wife Joanne that works also in the company’s customer service and marketing department.
1- The Value of Energy: It is important to understand that customers are unwilling to turn electricity off. Electricity is an enabling product. For example, we turn on the lamps using energy because we want to see and our computers because we want to work or be entertained. In other words, electricity is an intangible necessity that we take for granted in our modern society. As Fred also mentioned in the interview: “the value of electricity is much higher that its real cost… but there is a challenge to get people aware and care about their energy use”. In conclusion, we could say that electricity and water are like toilet paper; you miss it when it is gone
2- The Business Customer: Very few businesses can have a large impact in the load. For example, just 25 business customers can represent 40% of the peak load. This open the question of what can be done to better manage this load. These peaks over capacity have a huge cost impact on running a utility company and it is bad for business, both the final customer and the utility company.
3- The Residential Customer: There is an issue with language and the format of information as it is hard to process by individuals. It is hard to put together and easily visualize the information of your different energy utility bills such as electricity, natural gas and water, as in most cases are provided by different companies and sent by mail on different frequencies (per month, or every other month). The language is also different and hard to relate to. So normal questions arrive:
How to know what number of Kilowatts per hour are just too many?
How do I know what to do to reduce consumption?
What actions can I take for next month?
How can I measure those results?
Can I learn from other people like me? (crowdsourcing)
4- The Value of Automation: Fred shared his vision on how automation can become part of the attributes of buildings that businesses get interested in. Burbank Water and Power is working with several appliances manufacturers to better understand what can be automated and what are the different elements in a building that can be interconnected to provide a systems approach to the solution. Automation crossed with dynamic pricing can reduce the need for human behavior change while offering an opportunity for businesses to reduce costs. Who pays for the equipment required for automation is the question on the table, as well as what systems does automation include. It seems that some utilities companies are open to share part of the cost as automation can also help them to save money. Automation can bring a growing learning base that can help predictability to manage loads more efficiently. This again brought the conversation towards the value of an intelligence layer.
5- The Role of Appliances Companies: It is clear that utilities and appliances companies are sitting down to add automation and monitoring information as a value proposition to final consumers. Reality is that both wants the big data that it is generating indicating behavioral information from the consumer side in order to offer better service and build new ways to offer new products and services. Some appliances companies like GE are following a scheme that reminds us apple. They want to offer to consumers the value of connect GE’s appliances as an integrated system that can be controlled through any window (smartphone, tablet, computer or TV set).
Applications like GE Nucleus that help you monitor and manage the GE Brillion-enabled appliances shows this trend. The advantages for appliance manufacturers like GE is that they can sit down with the defragmented utilities companies and integrate them one by one into the same “system of appliances” adding an extra value to the final consumer. This new eco-system will build loyalty, exit barriers and a platform to offer new services to monitor, control or automate consumer’s homes. Does this remind a little bit what has happened with apple’s ecosystem and the different telecommunication companies around the world? One eco-system integrating all the different telco companies. The key thing is who can add more value to the user experience. Utilities companies of course do not see themselves disintermediated/loosing value offer to the final consumer and believe that in the midterm their value will be on enabling the “smart grid” integrating the renewables mix with the self generating solutions installed from households (i.e. growing solar panel installed base). For example, what will happen when your self-generating system goes down. A smart grid would connect you with other power sources seamless. Who will provide that?
6- Electric Vehicle Controllers: Automotive and utilities companies are also sitting together. How, where and when are we going to recharge our cars in the near future represent an important opportunity and utilities companies want to be ready providing solutions. Charging your car will have an impact on your energy monthly bill. For example, two electric vehicles would represent 40% of what a consumer uses per month, but also if millions of people do the charging at the same time of the day, the load will peak and the costs with it both for the consumer and the utilities company. Again, an automation layer and connection to the cloud will provide opportunities for variable charge rates.
7- Comparing with others: Burbank Water and Power has been working with OPOWER for the past 2 years. Joanne, Fred’s wife, works at the customer services and marketing department and shared with us that the best results of behavioral change is done by comparing with others. OPOWER adds easier visualization and comparison with other neighbors and area, as well as recommendations/tips to further improve the energy consumption. The key is to offer actionable suggestions. The key insight is that people want to have “more control” so OPOWER is offering more frequent information. For example, you can get alerts in your phone half month so you know that if you do not change your behavior, the energy bill will be large. Joanne also shared how important children can be in changing behaviors of a family and a home. They have even developed a program for 6th graders called LIVING WISE with very promising results.
To sum up, there are some key challenges that are important to take care for the solutions to be provided by our thesis:
1- Provide more real time transparency: How to make products to learn through measuring how to use energy more efficiently?
2-Appliances/products should be able to communicate how they are doing. Machine to Machine Internet would be needed with IPV6 to add security and protect privacy.
3- How to establish the holistic user experience from the retailer, the products, the interfaces, what levels of automation make sense, and how to maintain engagement through time?
4- How appliances will connect to the utility companies? Open standards will play an important role here. The lack of standards represent a large challenge for all the stakeholders.
Half way through the first of two terms of the thesis project. We are just 25% of the way, yet it seems like we have been working on this for half of our lives now.
The week started off with a session with Tim Brewer (who arrived in his awesome Dodge Viper!), an alum of gradID who is applying the TRIZ methodology to the kind of projects we work on in the program. This was meant to be a test session for him to test his tools out with a live project. The TRIZ methodology consists of patterns and trends that have occurred in technology innovation over the past 100 or so years. Using these, you can predict the future of a particular technology. Tim is condensing all this information into easy to use tools for designers to be able to apply them to problem-solving. The session gave us some good things to think about, but we were probably at too early a stage in the process to apply the TRIZ method effectively.
In other news, Krystina Castella is now back in gradID after 3 months of maternity leave. It is great to have her back! We got to speak with her too, and her feedback was spot on hitting all the points we were trying to cover too. She introduced us to a possibility of a B2B product, where manufacturers of appliances could install a module that would enable tracking and monitoring of consumption of energy.
Our meeting with the department chair – Andy Ogden was a lot of catching up since there had been a lot of progress since when we last met. His main point of advice for us was that we were approaching the project from a very technological point of view and we were missing the human need and business components. We came out of the meeting extremely motivated to move on to the next stage of our process! So far we have been speaking to mostly experts, getting caught up with what is happening in the industry and what might be coming in the pipeline 2-4 years from now. It was time to dive deep into the user research and human need definition part of the process.
Outlining the goals for the user research, these are the things we are trying to find:
1. Who is our customer?
2. What are their needs?
3. What motivates them?
4. What are their perceptions related to energy consumption?
5. What do people want to know regarding their consumption?
6. Consumption patterns of electricity, water and natural gas
We brainstormed questions for the interviews based on the possibility of laddering into the answers people give to uncover contradictions. That’s where the opportunities lie! Generative tools such as a card sort are great for these kind of interviews. The way that works is you give people a set of cards that have images that evoke certain thoughts in their head, the more polarizing the better. Based on what they choose, we can then go further down into the real motivations for saying what they say and doing what they do. And hopefully after interviewing a good number of people, we will be able to notice patterns and contradictions that recur.
We also interviewed our first family – What a great couple Avinash and Rupali are! They are both super users for us in the sense that they are religiously keeping a check on their consumption of all types of energy at home. Since they moved into their house, they have been able to cut their bills almost in half just by optimizing their usage of their different appliances. Everyone should aspire to preserve energy like them! and save some money in the process
Here are our top three links from our Facebook group:
Triad: An Energy Monitoring Project You Might Actually Use – An interesting student project on a similar topic to ours, the article talks about the cost barriers to installing energy monitoring systems at home which we found useful. There are interesting business model opportunity.
The Psychology of Energy Consumption – A presentation from Linda Shuck regarding the application of behavior change strategies towards energy consumption. A useful resource.
OH! And I almost forgot! We also have our first sensor experiment up and running. An arduino powered monitor that we built is measuring live consumption of a power strip in my house and also recording the ambient light. Read all about it and check out the live graphs.
Here’s the consumption of current from a power strip in my house live! Hit refresh to see it updating!
Added in an ambient light sensor just for fun!
The Setup:
This is what the setup looks like. The current sensor on the right is clipped onto a power strip that powers my laptop, monitor, speakers, television and three bulbs. The other end is connected to the arduino (that’s the gray wire you see coming into the breadboard above). The arduino is programmed to convert the reading from the current sensor into the right units for measuring current. We used the schematics and code from the OpenEnergyMonitor project, thanks to all the lovely folks of the open source kind there!
So all this data was being generated and not visualized! Phil Van Allen has told us about this service called Pachube during our interview with him. We signed up, and after going through a simple tutorial of connecting an arduino to their website, we got the above graphs up and running. Also hooked up our twitter account @preservenergy to tweet when the values change too much.
Now the important question. All this is cool but what next?
Turns out behavioral change is quite a difficult thing to do. That’s what the biggest challenge of this project is going to be. Not technology, not business, but how to get people to care about the amount of energy they consume. We’re beginning to wrap our minds around the various strategies that are used and established in the behavioral psychology community. Here are the ones we are seeing used often:
1. Reinforcement/Conditioning – Positive or negative, reinforcement in any form, whether tangible (seeing numbers drop on your bill, rewards) or an intangible (feelings of happiness or disappointment) are a good way to get people to change behavior. This is a tried and tested phenomenon documented best in the famous Pavlov experiments.
2. Social Pressure – Creating competition amongst a group of people in order to achieve bragging rights is also a good motivator for behavioral change. A company called oPower is doing exactly this with their project in Glendale, CA. They send out a report card every month to residents of a neighborhood with information about their personal consumption and how they stack up against the community. In their tests, the numbers became conversation starters amongst neighbors and quiet competition ensued.
3. Visualization of goals – In speaking with Don Norman, he explained how he lost 10 lbs. using the website Lose It! One of the main drivers was to be able to visualize the path he had set out on to achieve the goals he had set for himself. Seeing progress towards a goal is a good self-motivator.
At the end of the day, the Prius effect comes into play quite nicely within this realm – Save money, save time and the eco-image.
Week 6 was quite an eventful week for the preservenergy project. We had a chance to interview four amazing people – Don Norman, Lara Srivastava, Shane Gring and Luke Fishback. Here’s a summary of what we spoke about.
Don Norman – Author, The Design of Everyday Things – Dr. Norman gave us one hour of his time! Apparently this is the time of year he’s not traveling around the world, so we were lucky to have caught him now. We spoke about the various methods to change behavior, how technology relates to human need and how products like the Nest Thermostat are the future of what everyday household appliances will be like. More on the interview in the blogpost that Hugo wrote.
Lara Srivastava – Technologist and Philosopher – Lara is an advisor to the EU on policy issues relating to the Internet of Things. She has quite an insane bio! We spoke about human issues related to the IoT. She was of the opinion that a field as tech-heavy as the IoT is desperately seeking designers to join the fold. At the end of the day, amazing technology without a proper user experience is bound for failure. A fun conversation, and we hope to keep talking to her as the project develops.
Shane Gring – Co-founder, BOULD – Shane is a social entrepreneur working to help architects right out of school to get savvy on LEED in the process of working on Habitat for Humanity projects. LEED was not on our radar until we met Shane. It seems that there is a huge opportunity for creating systems for LEED certified homeowners to continue to maintain their LEED status months and years after the certification has been done. There are a lot of very interesting systems that LEED homes use to save energy, and it is definitely worth looking into.
Luke Fishback – Founder, PlotWatt – Luke was introduced to us by our instructor H. Wook Kim and boy are we thankful to him for doing so. It was an uncanny discussion in the way that all the insights and opportunities that he has identified for Plotwatt were exactly in line with what we have been thinking so far, even the business model was almost identical! They are doing some amazing work and are cutting people’s bills by an average of 20% and sometimes upto 50%! He was so helpful that we might partner with plotwatt for the technology part of the project and then build our layers on top of that.
Facetime with faculty was at a minimum this week. 13 thesis students in one class has been quite a challenge for our faculty to manage. We managed to meet only with Steve Montgomery and what ensued was an enthusiastic discussion of Steve, his house and his wife. It almost turned into another interview where we were trying to get at his and his wife’s habits when it came to energy consumption. We love Steve and he always raises our spirits!
The Preservenergy project has a closed Facebook group where Hugo and I share and discuss interesting findings from the internet. Since it wouldn’t be too pleasant to follow a crazy Spaniard and Indian going at it on the group, I’m going to pull out the top three findings of the week and share it here for everyone’s benefit!
A lot to look forward to next week – A session with Tim “TRIZMaster” Brewer, some experiments with arduinos and some brainstorming on user research methodologies. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below or follow us on twitter.
Very inspiring talk with Dr. Norman today: author of The Design of Everyday Things among many other books and papers embracing the importance of user-centered design (more details on his website). We covered a great variety of topics and examples related to the behavioral change around our energy consumption habits. This is a sum up of the key points extracted from the conversation:
1. Basically human habits are “automatic”, they turn into habits after hundreds/thousands of repetitions so changing them is really hard. For example, leaving the lights on around the house in rooms where we are not even at.
2. Once I learn through a device what my energy consumption is, two big questions arrive: WHAT would I do with the information? WHY would I be interested on that information”? There has to be positiveactions that people can take after learning the inefficiency of certain appliances draining energy at their homes. For example, if I learn through any monitoring system that my fridge is consuming most of my electricity bill, what can I do after learning this?
3. The design challenge is based on a technology and a behavioral problem. It is not only about resolving the technology problem (hardware and software) but also how to present the information in an easy and attractive way with suggestions for actions/possible solutions they can base their decisions on (actionable items). The behavior problem could be tackled through a “social” layer based on goal settings, ongoing feedback and enlisting neighbors and friends. For example, running platform like Nike+ and weight loss program Loseit.com base their behavior change on those 3 main pilars integrating a social dimension to trigger emotional states of reinforcement, fulfillment, contentment… and in some cases, with little dosis, disappointment and frustration. A recipe to make me feel good internally but challenged enough and reinforced to value it and do not give up.
4. The importance of research through observation the“pain points” of human behavior at home or at the office and its impact on the energy consumption. For example, when we do not turn the ice maker off in our fridge or when we leave the door open releasing hot or cold air. There are dozens of this small habits that we might take into consideration when designing a system to improve this behaviors.
5. User experience is a growing challenge. Before the smartphones and tablets we were clearly converging with Mac OS and Windows being very close platforms of UX (with differences, but similar rules of engagement). Now we have more operating systems and developers with interface and interaction designers have a growing challenge of platforms and screen sizes. In conclusion, there is a big battle and a lack of standards that is generating a new divergence of devices and their user experience creating too much complexity and confusion for the moment. Some start-ups are so focused on developing an app that works in all this platforms and screen sizes that they forget to put more energy on the device itself and the holistic user experience.
We are very excited and inspired by this conversation with Dr. Norman today and look forward to any ideas and thoughts from you. What do you think? Your feedback is always welcomed and valued. Thank you!
It is just six weeks into the project and it already seems like an eternity since we started! We’ve been trying hard to get smart about the domains we are trying to work in, learn from experiences of other people and start making some initial sketches about the kind of system we’d like to design. We’re tackling a problem that a lot of people have tried to tackle and we believe that the value we can provide in terms of overall system design will be our key differentiator. So here’s the topic that we have decided to pursue:
How do you create behavioral change towards energy consumption at home?
Quite a task we’ve set ourselves! The first aspect to the problem is the issue of behavioral change. There seems to be a lot of automatic behavior (see already in place for things like turning off lights, modulating the thermostat, conserving water etc that is already in place. Changing this is going to be hard. The second aspect is energy consumption at home. How many of you are aware of the amount of energy that is consumed at home? Whether it is electricity, natural gas or water? If you are aware, what would you do with that information? Would learning that your fridge is the most wasteful appliance at home actually make a difference of whether you continue using it? Most likely not. That kind of information would likely piss you off and you turn of the monitoring completely. Those are the kinds of things we want to avoid, and better still, design for, so that the emotions that the system evokes is not an extreme one (A lot of this is from our interview with Don Norman, read our highlights post).
Back to our journey so far. We started out extremely broad with the topic of “Humanizing the Internet of Things”. A lot of research later, we realized that we would quickly need to focus in on a specific part of this burgeoning field. What excites us is that there is a lot of momentum in this field and a lot of large companies are pouring in a lot of money to achieve this vision, which is broadly that all the devices, appliances and objects around us connected and constantly streaming information about themselves and their surroundings. Now what we do with that data is the important question. With the right amount of intelligence and visualization, we can drive that up the information pyramid as below.
So we narrowed our focus to two fields namely social networks and energy consumption. What would be the future of social networks assuming a future scenario where objects around us will be able to communicate on our behalf? And the other is the topic that you see above. After much consideration of both areas and speaking to some interesting people relating to the two fields, we decided to focus on energy management. Below is a snapshot of our process so far.
Back to energy again. There are a ton of companies that have created products and services in this area. Some worth mentioning are DIY Kyoto’s Wattson, Current Cost and Kill-a-watt. Larger companies like Belkin, Microsoft and Google are also playing in this field. But the issue is that most of them have failed or haven’t been able to create an impact in the market. There are possibly several reasons for this – people don’t really value having their energy monitored, the technology is too high a barrier for initial set up and remains in the territory of DIY enthusiasts or just simply that their products aren’t getting it right. This is the landscape as it exists now (this isn’t exhaustive of course).
We are very excited with the direction we have so far and are looking forward to creating something of value. We would love to hear what you think about our topic so far! Please comment below!
We are Hugo Giralt Echevarria and Siddharth Vanchinathan - two graduate Industrial Design students at Art Center College of Design. For our thesis project, we are working on trying to change behavior towards energy consumption starting from the home. This blog is a documentation of our process and our findings along the way.
I don't know if you guys have checked out this book but it might be of interest. Quite an illuminating read on how we have been conditioned into doing certain things. The case study of brushing teeth is quite illuminating. http://www.amazon.com/Power-Habi on Week 6 Update – Pavlov, Prius and Plotwatt
