Energy Conservation Game
Effective feedback information is important to any form of communication as well as to be aware of the world we live, especially regarding to everyday life activities such as home use energy. Providing effective feedback on energy use helps raise people’s awareness of the link between their daily activities and results of energy consumption, and ultimately lets them better control their consumption to improve energy conservation.
The main goal of this project is to explore engaging aesthetics representations to make it more attractive, especially to children. Enhanced engagement adds potential to make it an educational tool to inform people of energy use and conservation. It also supports at-a-glance awareness, which requires less effort for people to notice and interpret the data. Finally, considering the aesthetics of both the visualization and the home as an explicit factor makes the display part of daily life and activities, and better integrate into the home.
To explore the effectiveness of using different aesthetic visualizations as feedback for residential energy use, we studied several of them with ambient displays and a simulation game. The game is chosen as a testing context because it offers more ecologically valid simulations and is more attractive to our test participants.
Game
A dollhouse with six rooms (mechanics, kitchen, living room, laundry, bedroom and washroom) simulated the home environment and drove the visualizations. Each room contains household appliances that users might turn on, off, or unplug to simulate their daily activities. The game consisted of four scenarios (entertainment, laundry, cooking and general house efficiency) that mimicked people’s everyday lives, each of which included five tasks. The tasks were designed to have special focus on activities that people might do to save energy in their home, for example, unplugging unused appliances to stop “vampire” power.
Researchers
- Mengting Sun
