Promoting sustainable energy consumption behavior through interactive data visualizations

Abstract

With an increasing worldwide need for energy and the ever-decreasing availability of energy resources, a wide range of interactive visualizations are being developed to allow people to use energy more efficiently by monitoring their consumption patterns and changing their energy usage behavior. For these visualizations to achieve their aim, they must not only target people’s energy saving objectives but also support the necessary factors that help people to change their underlying energy consumption behavior. In this paper, we survey several categories of existing interactive energy visualizations and through a number of selected examples in each case, identify possible potentials for supporting any user behavior changes. For this survey, we have used the behavior change model originally proposed by B. J. Fogg, which defines three factors of motivation, trigger and ability. Our survey has shown that most existing interactive visualizations target the motivation factor, with some supporting trigger or ability and only a few dealing with all the three factors of the behavior change model.