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Home, habits, and energy: examining domestic interactions and energy consumption

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of people's everyday interactions with energy-consuming products and systems in the home. Initial results from a large online survey are also considered. This research focuses not only on "conservation behavior" but importantly investigates interactions with technology that may be characterized as "normal consumption" or "over-consumption." A novel vocabulary for analyzing and designing energy-conserving interactions is proposed based on our findings, including: cutting, trimming, switching, upgrading, and shifting. Using the proposed vocabulary, and informed by theoretical developments from various literatures, this paper demonstrates ways in which everyday interactions with technology in the home are performed without conscious consideration of energy consumption but rather are unconscious, habitual, and irrational. Implications for the design of energy-conserving interactions with technology and broader challenges for HCI research are proposed.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2010
    2690 pages
    ISBN:9781605589299
    DOI:10.1145/1753326
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 April 2010

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    1. energy
    2. sustainability
    3. sustainable interaction design

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    • (2024)Turn down for watt: Community fit and thermal comfort habituation predict average household heating energy consumptionPLOS Climate10.1371/journal.pclm.00004073:7(e0000407)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
    • (2024)A Case Study of Situating Energy Temporality towards Designing for Communal EnergyProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685484(1-11)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)A Year in Energy: Imagining Energy Community Participation with a Collaborative Design FictionProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685355(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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    • (2024)Households in energy transition: Promoting household energy-sufficient routines via app-based peer-to-peer interactionEnvironmental Innovation and Societal Transitions10.1016/j.eist.2024.10086852(100868)Online publication date: Sep-2024
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