Feedback on energy use mainly uses visual, numerical interfaces. This paper introduces an alternative: energy sonification, turning real-time electricity use data from appliances into ambient sound. Powerchord, a work in progress prototype developed through co-creation with householders, is detailed.

People do not set out to ‘use energy’. Its use is a consequence of humanity, in all its diversity, dealing with the needs of everyday life—comfort, light, sustenance, sanitation, entertainment, social activity, and so on (Wilhite, 2013). Energy use is thus always going to be situated socially and culturally within contexts that affect people’s understanding, decision-making and priorities. However, many interventions (political and technological) effectively lump ‘energy demand’ together as something homogeneous, addressable through one ‘solution’, across multiple contexts, embodying assumptions about how ‘the public’ thinks and decides, cultural and social norms, and time availability (Hazas et al, 2012). Interventions respond to a particular way of framing the ‘problem’ of energy use—often “seeing users as the problem” (DiSalvo et al, 2010)—and inevitably encode particular models of human behaviour (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2007; Greenfield, 2013). As Argyris and Schön (1974) put it, “An interventionist is a man struggling to make his model of man come true”. As designers—in the broadest sense of people devising “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969)—we cannot avoid having models of human behaviour. However, we can make an effort to challenge our own assumptions, ensuring that our research process attempts to uncover and apply more nuanced models. We should do research with people, in context, to understand why they use energy as they do, in different circumstances, and hence design interventions taking account of these deeper insights.

What Does Energy Look Like? was a two-part empirical study conducted within a European energy research project, which invited people to visualise (through pen on paper), their ideas, mental models, experiences and notions of energy. What emerged was a collection of over sixty Energy Drawings that presents a diverse and multifaceted picture of this often intangible and amorphous subject; and which suggests a broad and sometimes contrasting range of personal definitions and conceptualisations of energy. In this paper we will discuss our findings from our drawing study. We will consider what they tell us about our samples’ aesthetic perception and judgement of energy, the different responses across the samples; and the nature of the categorisations, characterisations and associations that emerged.

Reducing home energy use is a major societal challenge, involving behaviour change alongside infrastructure improvements. However, many approaches lump ‘energy demand’ together as something homogeneous, addressable primarily through quantitative feedback, rather than basing interventions on an understanding of why people use energy as they do. Our contention is that people don't set out to ‘use energy’: its use is a side effect of solving everyday problems, meeting needs for comfort, light, cooking, cleaning, entertainment, and so on. Design researchers at the Royal College of Art have been carrying out ethnographic research with a diverse range of householders, investigating nuances of daily interactions with heating and lighting, meters and appliances—alongside people's understanding of energy and how their actions affect its use. Insights, integrated with household monitoring data, will inform the co‐design of prototype products and services to help people reduce their energy use while meeting needs.

Food Loop was an action research project that ran on the Maiden Lane Estate in North London between March 2009 and November 2010. The project was based on the broad hypothesis that one of the best ways to get people to care about food waste is by making the local benefits of recycling and composting visible, and by ensuring that people are able to design a food waste system that best meets their needs. The project tested the value of co-design in the creation of local services. The Food Loop project team worked closely with residents of the Estate to initiate a new food waste collection service and to continuously evaluate and improve the service. The London Borough of Camden initially funded the delivery of the new service. When compost became available from the recycling of food waste, residents and other stakeholders were engaged to envision how it should be used, and helped to craft a plan for future food-growing on the Estate. The Food Loop project was documented and a short film was created

Food Loop was an action research project that ran on the Maiden Lane Estate in North London between March 2009 and November 2010. The project was based on the broad hypothesis that one of the best ways to get people to care about food waste is by making the local benefits of recycling and composting visible, and by ensuring that people are able to design a food waste system that best meets their needs. The project tested the value of co-design in the creation of local services. The Food Loop project team worked closely with residents of the Estate to initiate a new food waste collection service and to continuously evaluate and improve the service. The London Borough of Camden initially funded the delivery of the new service. When compost became available from the recycling of food waste, residents and other stakeholders were engaged to envision how it should be used, and helped to craft a plan for future food-growing on the Estate.

In the imminent future, scarcity of resources will require architects to be as engaged with the redesign of services and infrastructure as they are now with the specifying of new materials. This is a situation that will be made all the more urgent by the increasing gap in public spending at a local and national level. Clare Brass, Flora Bowden and Kate McGeevor describe SEED Foundation, an enterprise that advocates new design approaches for sustainability, and explain how FoodLoop, a food waste and food growing project in London, is helping residents of the Maiden Lane Estate in King's Cross to take over the running of a food waste collection scheme without the aid of council funding.

In this paper, Brass set out a research agenda, proposing a shift in the role of design from commercial and manufacturing issues to social and environmental ones. The paper triangulates the work of current academic design thinking on the reduction of products’ environmental impact through composition (McDonough and Braungart) or life extension (Jonathan Chapman) with thinking outside the field of design offered by experts in systems (Donella Meadows, Peter Senge), economic futures (Andrew Zolli, Amartya Sen) and community engagement (Ezio Manzini), and builds a link to current and future policy goals (Sustainable Development Commission, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, etc.). Outlining design’s predominant use as a tool for boosting economic growth, the paper highlights both the value and relevance of design tools for addressing social and environmental issues. Service design thinking allows people’s needs to be fulfilled through new, easier and more desirable experiences, without a dependency on sales of physical objects. Citing various initiatives (RED, DOTT ’07, Zest Innovation, etc.) the paper supports the notion of transferability of design skills to public service challenges, and highlights the potential for design to play an active role in the creation and support of social and environmental enterprises. Brass suggests that sustainability is an overwhelmingly social issue, and that design needs to play to its user-centric strengths. To facilitate this, design education would need to be broadened to stretch beyond the current focus on products and to include a more systemic approach. Three main gaps in current design education are identified: infrastructure, interconnectivity, and relationships between business, government and people. From this perspective, a proposition has been developed offering a practical application of the thinking presented. HiRise Gardens (SEED Foundation), proposing a new design-led approach to waste management, was later developed into FoodLoop (see Brass REF Output 3).

This paper reports on work in progress to develop Powerchord, a near-real-time sonification system for electricity use data. Built around a common model of UK electricity monitor, Powerchord plays a variety of birdsong of different intensities in response to the instantaneous power readings from multiple household appliances, providing a form of ambient feedback intended to fit with the soundscapes of everyday domestic life while still enabling a deeper understanding of the energy use of appliances in the home. We start by setting the context of the broader ‘design for sustainable behaviour’ and energy use feedback fields, noting the predominance of visual feedback displays. We then describe findings from a programme of design research with householders, which highlighted that energy’s ‘invisibility’ is a barrier to behaviour change. Co-creation work with householders led to exploring the development of sonification of energy data, first in summary form, and then in near realtime. The affordances of birdsong are discussed, and future research possibilities outlined.