Beyond Eco-feedback: Using Room as a Context to Design New Eco-support Features at Home

In recent years research in Sustainable Interaction Design has put major efforts into understanding the potentials of saving energy in private households by providing energy consumption feedback. Trying to overcome pitfalls such as invisibility and immateriality, a great variety of designs with saving potentials from 5–15 %, has emerged. However, feedback mechanisms are mostly reduced to a one-dimensional view on motivating energy savings. In this paper, we argue to take a broader view on eco-support, where eco-feedback should be used in combination with eco-control and eco-automation features. All these features have in common that they aim to reduce energy consumption in practice. From such a holistic understanding of eco-support, we demonstrate how design could benefit from ubiquitous- and context-aware computing approaches to enrich feedback, increase control and automatize cumbersome and boring routines. We use the presence of a user on room level as context information. Rooms present an essential domestic ordering system that structures daily routines at home. In this paper, we show that the usage of room-as-a-context has fundamental implications for the design of domestic indoor localization concepts. In addition, we show how the different types of eco-support systems benefit from it. We illustrate our consideration by presenting a prototype for Android based tablets, which was used to study the design concepts in the wild.