Abstract
Although an enormous amount of research effort has been devoted to understanding people’s energy consumption habits, visualizing their consumption and finding ways of motivating them towards more sustainable behaviours we are still in the dark with regards to people’s basic perception of electricity, their concept of what electricity is and their notion of the consumption rates of various electrical devices. In this study we have employed a sketching methodology to elicit people’s basic mental image of what electricity is, how they conceive of the electrical infrastructure in their home and which devices they think represent the largest drain on their wallets. Preliminary analysis of the results show that people do not have a clear mental model of electricity and tend to associate the size of the device and the duration of use with higher rates of consumption regardless of the type of device, the type of use it is put to and its actual consumption level.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Attari, S.Z., DeKay, M.L., Davidson, C.I., de Bruin, W.B.: Public perceptions of energy consumption and saving. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2010); PNAS published ahead of print August 16, 2010, Retrieved from: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full.pdf+html
Bostrom, A., Morgan, M.G., Fischhoff, B., Read, D.: What do people know about global climate change? 1. Mental models. Risk Analysis 14(6), 959–970 (1994)
Chetty, M., Banks, R., Harper, R., Regan, T., Sellen, A., Gkantsidis, C., Karagiannis, T., et al.: Who’s Hogging The Bandwidth?: The Consequences Of Revealing The Invisible In The Home. Technology, 659–668 (2010)
Chetty, M., Brush, A.J.B., Meyers, B.R., Johns, P.: It’s not easy being green: understanding home computer power management. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), pp. 1033–1042 (2009)
Chetty, M., Tran, D., Grinter, R.E.: Getting to green: understanding resource consumption in the home. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2008), pp. 242–251 (2008)
Darby, S.: The Effectiveness of Feedback on Energy Consumption. A Review for DEFRA of the Literature on Metering Billing and direct Displays. Oxford University – Environmental Change Institute (2006), Retrieved from: http://www.vaasaett.com:81/xmlui/handle/123456789/133
Dillahunt, T., Mankoff, J., Paulos, E., Fussell, S.: It’s not all about “Green”: energy use in low-income communities. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2009), pp. 255–264 (2009)
Dunlap, R.E.: Lay Perceptions of Global Risk: Public Views of Global Warming in Cross-National Context. International Sociology 13, 473–498 (1998)
Foster, D., Lawson, S., Blythe, M., Cairns, P.: Wattsup?: Motivating reductions in domestic energy consumption using social networks. In: Procedings of Nordi CHI 2010 (2010)
Friedman, B., Hurley, D., Howe, D.C., Felten, E., Nissenbaum, H.: Users’ Conceptions of Web Security: A Comparative Study. In: CHI 2002 Extended Abstracts. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Froehlich, J., Findlater, L., Landay, J.: The design of eco-feedback technology. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010 (1999)
Gustafsson, A., Gyllenswärd, M.: The power- aware cord: energy awareness through ambient information display. In: Ext. Abs. CHI 2005, pp. 1423–1426. ACM Press, New York (2005)
He, H.A., Greenberg, S.: Motivating Sustainable Energy Consumption in the Home. Psychologist, 1–5 (2008)
Furby, L., Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., Gregory, R.: Public Perceptions of Electric Power Transmission Lines. Journal of Environmental Psychology 8, 19–43 (1988)
Lynch, K.: The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge (1960)
Mankoff, J., Matthews, D., Fussell, S.R., Johnson, M.: Leveraging Social Networks to Motivate Individuals to Reduce their Ecological Footprints. In: Proc. HICSS 2007 (2007)
Martin, N.: Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore. FT Press, Upper Saddle River (2008)
McLuhan, M.: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, Cambridge (1994)
Mehlwana, A.M.: The anthropology of fuels: situational analysis and energy use in urban low-income townships of South Africa. Energy for Sustainable Development 3(5), 5–15 (1997); International Energy Initiative, Inc., Retrieved from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0973082608602082
Milgram, S., Jodelet, D.: Psychological maps of Paris. In: Proshan, H., Ittelson, W., Rivlin, L. (eds.) Environmental Psychology, 2nd edn., pp. 104–124. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York (1976)
Pierce, J., Odom, W., Blevis, E.: Energy aware dwelling: a critical survey of interaction design for eco-visualizations. In: Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Conference on Computer Human Interaction - Designing for Habitus and Habitat, pp. 1–8 (2008)
Pierce, J., Paulos, E.: Materializing energy in everyday life. In: Proceedings of CHI 2010 (2010)
Pierce, J., Schiano, D.J., Paulos, E.: Home, Habits, and Energy: Examining Domestic Interactions and Energy Consumption. Human Factors, 1985–1994 (2010)
Poole, E.S., Chetty, M., Grinter, R.E., Edwards, W.K.: More than meets the eye: transforming the user experience of home network management. Designing Interactive Systems, 455–464 (2008)
Read, D., Bostrom, A., Morgan, M.G., Fischhoff, B., Smuts, T.: What do people know about global climate change? 2: Survey Studies of Educated Laypeople. Risk Analysis 14(6), 971–982 (1994)
Rittel, H., Webber, M.: Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences 4, 155–169 (1973)
Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., Kaye, J.: Reflective design. In: Proc. of Critical Computing 2005, pp. 49–58. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Strengers, Y.: Smart metering demand management programs: challenging the comfort and cleanliness habitus of households. In: Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Conference on Computer Human Interaction, OZCHI 2008, pp. 9–16 (2008)
Vertesi, J.: Mind the Gap: The ”Tube Map” as London’s User Interface. In: Engaging the City Workshop Paper, CHI 2005 (2005)
Yan, Z.: What Influences Children’ s and Adolescents’ Understanding of the Complexity of the Internet? Developmental Psychology 42(3), 418–428 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chisik, Y. (2011). An Image of Electricity: Towards an Understanding of How People Perceive Electricity. In: Campos, P., Graham, N., Jorge, J., Nunes, N., Palanque, P., Winckler, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2011. INTERACT 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6949. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23768-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23768-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23767-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23768-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)