Accounting for energy-reliant services within everyday life at home

Abstract

Researchers in pervasive and ubiquitous computing have produced much work on new sensing technologies for disaggregating domestic resource consumption, and on designs for energy-centric interventions at home. In a departure from this, we employ a service-oriented approach, where we account for not only the amount of resources that specific appliances draw upon, but also how the associated services may be characterised in the context of everyday life. We undertook a formative study in four student flats over a twenty-day period, collecting data using interviews with eleven participants and over two hundred in-home sensors. Following an in-depth description of observations and findings from our study, we argue that our approach provides a more inclusive range of understandings of resources and everyday life than has been shown from energy-centric approaches. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.