Author(s):
Quintal, Filipe Magno Gouveia
Date: 2016
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/1141
Origin: DigitUMa - Repositório da Universidade da Madeira
Subject(s): Ciência e tecnologia informáticas; Informática; Energia; Instalações interativas; Impacto ambiental; Energia eletrica; Consumo doméstico; Eletricidade; Sustentabilidade; Ambiente; Soluções informáticas; Meio natural; Dimensões ecológicas; Electrical energy; Eco-feedback devices; Informatics Engineering - Human Computer Interaction; .; Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e da Engenharia; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática
Description
Worldwide reports about energy usage have noted the importance of the domestic energy consumption sector in the worldwide scenario. This fact motivated and supported the birth and spread of the so-called eco-feedback devices. Such devices provide information about individual or group energy consumption behavior with the goal of reducing the impact in the environment. Motivated by the body of work which questions the long term effectiveness of eco-feedback systems, this thesis focus on evaluating in-the-wild the long term usage of eco-feedback systems. We have conducted five long term studies with different eco-feedback systems designed to evaluate different dimensions in the design of eco-feedback plus two more focused short term studies aimed at studying concrete approaches. Our summary reports on the fact that the there is a novelty effect associated with ecofeedback systems in which the usage of these devices declines significantly after a month. We did not found evidence that the novelty effect is related to location or the type of information represented, nor that the decrease in the eco-feedback usage could lead to the consumption relapsing to values previous to the introduction of the eco-feedback. Our work has also generated other contributions related to the positioning of the feedback, using metaphors for representing the consumption and presenting information about the source of the energy in the feedback.
