Rent-a-Watt: Rethinking energy use feedback

Abstract

This paper details our journey toward re-imagining eco-feedback at scale. Simple in-home displays are found to offer limited efficacy and become disused, yet it is simply not feasible (or at least politically acceptable) to deploy high quality feature-rich energy feedback to every household in a region. This paper presents Rent-a-Watt, a speculative, rentable, sharing economy-based model of energy use feedback which is envisaged as a means of providing energy literacy at scale. Based on findings from a preliminary field deployment, we identify limits to engagement with smart plug-based feedback and outline avenues for future work, arguing a case for a sharing economy model of energy use feedback and the potential for a marriage of HCI work on energy use feedback with that on user-led thermal performance audits.