Eco-Visualization StrategiesCritical Review & Framework

Eco-visualizations (EVs) are any kind of interactive device targeted at revealing energy use in order to promote sustainable behaviours or foster positive attitudes towards sustainable practices. There are some interesting, informative, highly creative, and delightful EVs now available. This project offered the foundational critical survey of noteworthy EVs for the HCI community and advanced ways of classifying and thinking about them in terms of scale and contexts of use. This project provided a foundation for practitioners to design new EVs in more varied scales and contexts and for researchers to continue to refine understandings of how effective EVs can be and how EVs can be made to be more effective. This work was conducted in the Sustainable Interaction Design Research Group at Indiana University. In this project, we draw on our own experiences of putting these ideas into practice through the design and deployment of a campus wide energy and water consumption visualization system (a project called the ‘Energy Challenge’ and lead by David Roedl). A screen shot of the Energy Challenge interface can be viewed to the left.

Publications

Odom, W., Pierce, J., Roedl, D. (2008). Social Incentive & Eco-Visualization Displays: Toward Persuading Greater Change in Dormitory Communities. In workshop proceedings of Public and Situated Displays to Support Communities. OZCHI 2008 Conference. (.pdf)

Pierce, J., Odom, W., Blevis, E. (2008). Energy Aware Dwelling: A Critical Survey of Interaction Design for Eco-Visualizations. In proceedings of OZCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems Cairns, Australia. OZCHI ’08. ACM Press, 1-10. (Local CopyACM Link)