This thesis explores home energy management (HEM), an emerging field for interface design and sustainability. Section 1 introduces HEM’s broader context. In Section 2, I review the literature surrounding HEM. Section 3 outlines the usability study on the ecobee Smart Thermostat, to evaluate the technology’s ease-of-use, and better understand users’ experience with current HEM technology. Section 4 describes a “Critical Making” workshop, where participants investigated HEM through material interaction and discussion. Section 5 describes and evaluates the potential design spaces gleaned from previous sections. In Section 6, I return to the literature to investigate key concepts underlying the design intervention for the chosen design space. Section 7 describes my design intervention and experimental evaluation. In Section 8, I present the study results, which suggest enhanced display labelling had a significant and directional effect on user-selected temperatures. In Section 9, I discuss these results, study limitations, and make conclusions and recommendations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/42924 |
| Date | 28 November 2013 |
| Creators | Stein, Joshua |
| Contributors | Jamieson, Gregory Allan |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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