The greatest contributor of CO2 emissions in the average American household is personal transportation. Because transportation is inherently a mobile activity, mobile devices are well suited to sense and provide feedback about these activities. In this paper, we explore the use of personal ambient displays on mobile phones to give users feedback about sensed and self-reported transportation behaviors. We first present results from a set of formative studies exploring our respondents ’ existing transportation routines, willingness to engage in and maintain green transportation behavior, and reactions to early mobile phone “green” application design concepts. We then describe the results of a 3-week field study (N=13) of the UbiGreen Transportation Display prototype, a mobile phone application that semi-automatically senses and reveals information about transportation behavior. Our contributions include a working system for semiautomatically tracking transit activity, a visual design capable of engaging users in the goal of increasing green transportation, and the results of our studies, which have implications for the design of future green applications. Author Keywords Sustainability, transportation, ubicomp, ambient displays

Energy feedback systems, particularly residential energy feedback systems (REFS), have emerged as a key area for HCI and interaction design. However, we argue that HCI researchers, designers and others concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems should more strongly consider the ineffectiveness of such systems, including not only potential limitations of specific types of REFS or REFS in general but also potentially counterproductive or harmful effects of REFS. In this paper we outline research questions and issues for future work based on critical gaps in REFS research identified from (i) a review of REFS literature and (ii) findings from two qualitative studies of commercial home energy monitors.

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The environment is affected by our collective behavior, yet many visualizations of energy saving behavior focus on personal actions, or simple, unidimensional comparisons between individuals and groups. Based on past work in social psychology and in environmental visualization, we present a design space for social visualizations that considers issues such as anonymity, dimensionality, and competition vs. collaboration. We describe the design and implementation of a social visualization of energy saving behavior. This visualization goes beyond past examples in that it includes both uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional comparative feedback. It is designed to scale to a small group of dorms or a whole city. We evaluated our visualization in the context of a dorm competition at a small liberal arts college. While this was a preliminary study, it helps to provide formative data on the value of our visualization. 1.

Energy use in the home is a topic of increasing interest and concern, and one on which technology can have a significant impact. However, existing work typically focuses on moderately affluent homeowners who have relative autonomy with respect to their home, or does not address socio-economic status, class, and other related issues. For the 30 % of the U.S. population who rent their homes, many key decisions regarding energy use must be negotiated with a landlord. Because energy use impacts the bottom line of both landlords and tenants, this can be a source of conflict in the landlord/tenant relationship. Ubicomp technologies for reducing energy use in rental units must engage with landlord/tenant conflicts to be successful. Unfortunately, little detailed knowledge is available about the impact of landlord/tenant conflicts on energy use. We present an analysis of a series of qualitative studies with landlords and tenants. We argue that a consideration of multiple stakeholders, and the power imbalances among them, will drive important new research questions and lead to more widely applicable solutions. The main contribution of our work is a set of open research questions and design recommendations for technologies that may affect and be affected by the conflict between stakeholders around energy use.

Fear of increasing prices and concern about climate change are motivating residential power conservation efforts. We investigate the effectiveness of several unsupervised disaggregation methods on low frequency power measurements collected in real homes. Specifically, we consider variants of the factorial hidden Markov model. Our results indicate that a conditional factorial hidden semi-Markov model, which integrates additional features related to when and how appliances are used in the home and more accurately represents the power use of individual appliances, outperforms the other unsupervised disaggregation methods. Our results show that unsupervised techniques can provide perappliance power usage information in a non-invasive manner, which is ideal for enabling power conservation efforts. 1

Addressing climate change: Psychology’s contribution

I. Defining “Behavioral Change”........................................................................................................ 2 II. Energy Use..................................................................................................................................... 2

What evolutionary economics has to say about energy and

In this work, we propose an interactive load monitoring system that provides instantaneous feedback of the energy consumption on household and device level. Therefore, we extended the capabilities of a smart electricity meter and developed a mobile phone interface that enables users to monitor, control, and interactively measure the consumption of their appliances. The system allows for identifying the biggest energy guzzlers and helps users decrease their energy consumption.