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While the purchases of organic food are increasing rapidly, it accounts for only a small fraction of the total consumption, and there is still a big gap between consumer values awareness and the actual consumption. This article explores how detailed personal feedback could help the households to gain insight and reflect on their consumption, the text presents the design process of developing a prototype, the EcoPanel, in collaboration with a major player on the food retail market. Based on the access to detailed tracking of purchase data, the aim of the design was to provide relevant feedback to facilitate for reflection on the user's own food choices. The design prototype is intended to serve as an instrument for insight and reflection and to bring unconscious aspects of grocery shopping to conscious awareness. Following a research through design approach, this article describes the interdependent steps in designing the EcoPanel and design decisions playing a role for users' critical reflection of their food choice practices. It discusses the intention of each module in providing insight. Finally, we discuss how a social practice perspective may be useful for identifying fruitful future research into the design for more sustainable grocery shopping practices QC 20151218 D2S - From Data to Sustainable Practices

There is increasing concern regarding current energy feedback approaches as they focus on the individual level, and mostly on household electricity, while the bulk of energy use often lies in heating and cooling. The aim is typically to change user routines, which does not bring a long-lasting impact. In our case study, we address these concerns for apartment buildings by looking at housing cooperatives, the dominant form of apartment ownership in the Nordic countries. These cooperatives manage the heating costs in common and therefore have a large potential for energy saving through long-lasting improvements and investments. We also emphasise the amateur nature of energy work within such cooperatives and consider the implications of our field study findings, interpreted through these amateur and cooperative perspectives, for the design of interactive artefacts. QC 20150617

In this work we describe an educational experience focused on the design of eco-feedback interfaces for improving the environmental awareness and optimizing the energy consumption in domestic contexts. The experience was held during the HCI course for the Laurea degree in Computer Science of the Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia and involved about 80 undergraduate students that worked on 20 independent projects. All the projects were focused on the same conceptual design goal: proposing an ecosystem of interfaces for a family of four components (mother, father and two children aged between 6 and 11), capable of monitoring energy consumption and production of a photovoltaic plant and making different types of comparison, even with neighbors and selected members of social networks. The result of the students' work was evaluated by adults (i.e., researchers and peers) but also by a class of children of the Primary School. The interest of this educational experience is threefold. On one side the study has permitted to focus on the themes of environmental awareness and has led to define interesting conceptual projects that go beyond the commercially available eco-feedback solutions. Then the study has been an occasion for reflecting about methods and goals of an HCI course for undergraduate students, originating a design experience that will be further refined in the next editions of the course. Finally the experience has been an interesting occasion for testing the points of strength and weakness of tools for remote learning. This has led to identify some possible solutions supporting design thinking in a remote or blended educational context, which should foster the shift from simple project sharing to true collaborative design.

This thesis presents a low cost non-intrusive home energy monitor built on top of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) concepts and techniques. NILM solutions are already considered low cost alternatives to the big majority of existing commercial energy monitors but the goal here is to make its cost even lower by using a mini netbook as a whole in one solution. The mini netbook is installed in the homes main circuit breaker and computes power consumption by reading current and voltage from the built-in sound card. At the same time, feedback to the users is provided using the 11’’ LCD screen as well as other built-in I/O modules. Our meter is also capable of detecting changes in power and tries to find out which appliance lead to that change and it is being used as part of an eco-feedback platform that was build to study the long terms of energy eco-feedback in individuals. In this thesis the steps that were taken to come up with such a system are presented, from the basics of AC power measurements to the implementation of an event detector and classifier that was used to disaggregate the power load. In the last chapter results from some validation tests that have been performed are presented in order to validate the experiment. It is believed that such a system will not only be important as an energy monitor, but also as an open system than can be easily changed to accommodate and test new or existing nonintrusive load monitoring techniques. Universidade da Madeira

Eco-feedback is a strategy to increase awareness of resource use and to encourage conservation. We applied eco-feedback on household food waste with the prospective to increase awareness and explore its impact on food related decision-making. In this paper we present a prototype of an eco-feedback system for food waste, which was deployed in a student house. In preliminary findings, participants indicated positive effects on dealing with leftovers, food preparation and reection about food waste issues, when eco-feedback was deployed. Findings are used for the next design iteration of the concept and, for more concluding results, in a larger-scale evaluation.

Dynamic simulation is used in new buildings and renovations with the purpose to predict their thermal-energy performance, typically assuming a standard use of the buildings. Even if the role of occupants’ behavior is widely acknowledged to be a key factor influencing energy consumption in buildings, these predictive models are not used to quantify specific benefits deriving from precise occupants’ actions. In this work, a numerical–experimental campaign is carried out in a village of green buildings in central Italy, where the most innovative and efficient technologies are already implemented and, therefore, where further physical active or passive retrofits would not be cost-effective. This work demonstrates that, through a sophisticated theoretical–experimental modeling of a residential village, a substantial further energy saving is still to be achieved through zero-cost simple actions, i.e. human-based energy retrofits. Ordinary actions of energy waste reduction are described within the physical model with the final purpose to quantify the effect of occupancy operations considered at the same level of traditional physical retrofit scenarios. The combination of these human-based energy retrofits produces an annual personal primary energy saving of 239 kW h/person in the village, and a corresponding annual money saving of 84 €/person. This work shows that, when theoretical dynamic simulation models are performed in order to investigate buildings’ thermal-energy behavior and predict the cost-benefit efficacy of common physical energy retrofits, simple and effective human-based energy retrofits should be considered at the same level of physical retrofits, and even before them, for their intrinsic technical and economical efficacy.

In this paper we describe the design and the evaluation of a Web3D application for increasing the environmental awareness. The application has been designed in the context of an initiative of the Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia, named Sustainable Ca' Foscari, aimed at improving the environmental impact of the institution. The communication to students, teachers and technical personnel is an important part of the project, realized mainly through the institutional web portal. The goal of this application is to enhance further the web communication channel, stimulating the comprehension and the interest of the users for the environmental themes, showing the improvements obtained through the years in the different thematic areas. The application has been designed for providing a rich and engaging environment to a wide audience, taking advantage of the recent technical novelties for the seamless integration of a 3D environment into a web page, without requiring additional plugins. The Web3D application guides the user through a metaphorical representation of the 10 thematic areas considered by the University initiative, permitting the users to access dynamically the data available on the server for different time spans. The web application has been tested with 48 students of the undergraduate degree in Computer Science, that at the end of the test filled in a post-test questionnaire based on closed and open questions. The results of the questionnaire, that will be discussed in the paper, show a high level of appreciation, confirming the usefulness of advanced visualization techniques for stimulating the environmental awareness.

Overconsumption of natural resources and the associated environmental hazards are one of today’s most pressing global issues. In the western world, individual consumption in homes and workplaces is a key contributor to this problem. Reflecting the importance of individual action in this domain, this thesis focuses on studying and influencing choices related to sustainability and energy consumption made by people in their daily lives. There are three main components to this work. Firstly, this thesis asserts that people frequently make ineffective consumption reduction goal choices and attempts to understand the rationale for these poor choices by fitting them to goalsetting theory, an established theoretical model of behavior change. Secondly, it presents two approaches that attempt to influence goal choice towards more effective targets, one of which deals with mechanisms for goal priming and the other of which explores the idea that carefully designed toys can exert influence on children’s long term consumption behavior patterns. The final section of this thesis deals with the design of feedback to support the performance of environmentally sound activities. Key contributions surrounding goals include the finding that people choose easy sustainable goals despite immediate feedback as to their ineffectiveness and the discussion and study of goal priming mechanisms that can influence this choice process. Contributions within the design of value instilling toys include a theoretically grounded framework for the design of such toys and a completed and tested prototype toy. Finally, contributions in designing effective and engaging energy consumption feedback include the finding that negative feedback is best presented verbally compared with visually and this is exemplified and presented within a working feedback system. The discussions, concepts, prototypes and empirical findings presented in this work will be useful for both environmental psychologists and for HCI researchers studying eco-feedback.

International audience; The way users interact with systems requiring energy largely conditions their global environmental impact. Informing of the environmental consequences of usage of products/systems can generate increased awareness of its connection to environmental impacts, encouraging a change in user behaviour and resulting in products' global environmental impact. Various levels of product modification have been proposed, from simple information, through behaviour steering and persuasive technology. We focus on eco-feedback and distinguish three different modalities: neutral, positive and negative. Based on the conclusions of an experiment observing the consumption of paper towels, this article demonstrates: (1) An individual's general level of information about the environment has an influence on the effectiveness of the eco-feedback modality. (2) The effectiveness of a modality of eco-feedback diminishes over time. The potential of iterative user feedback combined with intelligent sensor embedded systems led to our defining the Green Use Learning Cycle as an innovative concept for eco-design. It underlines that products should be designed so that they can give feedback to users about the environmental performances of their usage (user adapts to product), and can analyse the dominant parameters of usage to be configured automatically to the environmental optimum throughout the life cycle (product adapts to user).