Eco-visualization for amateur energy work : Supporting energy management in Housing Cooperatives
Sammanfattning: Eco-visualization technologies aim to trigger more environmental behaviors by providing feedback about the usage of key resources such as energy. However, the design of these technologies to encourage energy conservation has been mainly focused on individual behaviors in a household level. Addressing a different approach researchers at KTH have designed the housing cooperative app, a web application that provides feedback about the collective energy consumption of housing cooperatives in Stockholm, aiming to reduce the cooperative's collective energy use. By using a Research Through Design approach, this thesis explores how data visualization can support amateur energy work through the housing cooperative app. For this, I identified design problems in the data visualization elements of the app, which I aimed to solve by redesigning them; then, I conducted semi structured interviews with amateur energy workers, where they interacted with the application, to generate new insights about how data visualization can be used in an amateur work context. Through the interviews it was possible to obtain qualitative answers about the challenges of amateurs energy workers and the way data visualization could be used to address theses challenges and achieve their goals in an efficient way. The interviews was divided in Background, Amateur work, Comprehension and Usefulness of the data, and were supported by a walkthrough in the application presenting to users different scenarios and features in the application. Results showed the potential that data visualizations have to support amateur energy workers to overcome their main challenges and to identify the rewards of their work. In this thesis I discuss about this potential, and about design aspects that are important to consider when designing eco-visualization technologies in amateur energy context.
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