Network Ecoinformatics: Development of a Social Ecofeedback System to Drive Energy Efficiency in Residential Buildings

Abstract

Numerous ecofeedback systems have been built around the proven principle that providing feedback to individuals about their energy use can lead to increased conservation through behavior change. This paper presents a novel ecofeedback system called Watt’s Watts, which is designed to leverage the impacts of individual and social feedback to influence energy consumption behavior. Watt’s Watts is one of the first ecofeedback systems that integrates individual-level, near-real-time energy consumption feedback within a social network environment and simultaneously collects network data that can be used to quantify social network effects on energy consumption. It was designed around two main goals: (1) to create a hardware/software integrated system that maximizes potential energy savings through behavior-based energy use reduction in residential buildings; (2) to collect data that will allow the validation of the user interface design and the examination of how social network dynamics impact energy consumption behavior. The objective of this paper is to introduce the concepts driving the design of the front and back ends of the novel Watt’s Watts system to inform the design and development of future socially oriented ecofeedback systems. It explains the principles that directly informed the design of the system’s interface, the methods by which the system’s design is validated in numerous studies, how the back end system design enabled the robust analysis undertaken in the validation studies, and the future research avenues enabled by the development of this system.