Deriving age diverse personas from a participatory design study on home electricity feedback

Abstract

Eco-feedback technology is generally concerned with the communication of information to affect individual or group behavior with respect to environmental impact. Electricity consumption feedback, in particular, has been studied from various viewpoints to understand its effects on consumption behavior and to explore the design space. Recent efforts have resulted in a wide array of device designs ranging from individual appliance feedback at the outlet to centralized devices for home consumption awareness. However, adoption rates for these technologies remain relatively poor, perhaps due to a lack of emphasis on specific user needs. In this paper, we contribute a participatory design study to examine differences and similarities among three targeted household demographics: older adults, families with children, and students in shared housing. In addition, we present our process for extracting personas from participatory design study data, alongside the set of resulting persona skeletons and one finished persona.