The Design of Home Energy-management Interfaces: Effects of Display Type on Thermostat Temperature Selection

This thesis explores home energy management (HEM), an emerging field for interface design and sustainability. Section 1 introduces HEM’s broader context. In Section 2, I review the literature surrounding HEM. Section 3 outlines the usability study on the ecobee Smart Thermostat, to evaluate the technology’s ease-of-use, and better understand users’ experience with current HEM technology. Section 4 describes a “Critical Making” workshop, where participants investigated HEM through material interaction and discussion. Section 5 describes and evaluates the potential design spaces gleaned from previous sections. In Section 6, I return to the literature to investigate key concepts underlying the design intervention for the chosen design space. Section 7 describes my design intervention and experimental evaluation. In Section 8, I present the study results, which suggest enhanced display labelling had a significant and directional effect on user-selected temperatures. In Section 9, I discuss these results, study limitations, and make conclusions and recommendations.MAS