You know the feeling. You come into work on a Monday morning and see you left your monitor on standby all weekend. Maybe you feel a fleeting sense of guilt but, you’re not paying the electricity bill, right?

Many of us are becoming more aware of our actions, energy consumption and how we affect the environment around us. So, how do we turn this knowledge and our transient environmental conscience into changes in our behaviour that consistently make us more energy efficient in everyday life?

I’ve recently been looking at a couple of papers to try and answer that very question. One paper from the University of St. Andrews [PDF] looked at changing energy consumption behaviour within a university environment, monitoring a number of participating schools.

Each school was given a slightly different program for encouraging energy saving behaviour, this included comparative feedback on other school and monetary rewards. Comparative information on other schools was found to be the most important factor in encouraging energy saving behaviour, the school receiving this information saved 12% over a twelve week period compared to non-participating schools.

The researchers at St. Andrews reported that the whole program increased awareness and reduced consumption (7% over non-participating schools). Participants also reported changing in attitude and lasting changes to their behaviour as a result of being involved.

Another interesting paper is the ‘Effectiveness of Feedback on Energy Consumption’ by Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford [PDF]. Comments are made within the document that people only have a vague idea of how much energy they are using and therefore feedback is vital.

Feedback through direct displays (something we are working on) is said to result in savings of 5-15% and the displays are most useful if they show instantaneous usage, expenditure and historic feedback. Another interesting point from the paper is that studies have found that it takes three months to learn a new (energy efficient) behaviour that a person will then adopt at least semi-permanently. This is consistent with the finding of the St. Andrews study. These are just some of the key points from the paper (actually a review for DEFRA) that covers a number of issues related to feedback, displays and behaviour, I encourage you to have a read.

All this information helps me to better understand people and try and help to create products that people want to interact with and that will also help reduce energy consumption.

-Aaron

 

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