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.
Highlights
The limited nature of fossil-fuel energy resources available worldwide, as well as the negative impact of their use on the environment and climate, are making it necessary to find alternative means of generating energy through more renewable resources, and to save energy whenever possible
We present a behavior change model we have adopted for analyzing our visualization categories
According to Fogg’s behavior change model, providing feedback is a means to increasing people’s awareness of their energy consumption patterns and if this is supported by elements of trigger and ability, it could lead to actual behavior change over time
Summary
The limited nature of fossil-fuel energy resources available worldwide, as well as the negative impact of their use on the environment and climate, are making it necessary to find alternative means of generating energy through more renewable resources, and to save energy whenever possible. The aim of such visualizations—built-in or otherwise—is to provide users with some kind of feedback, in an attempt to make the energy use less “hidden” to them. Discourse: This dimension concerns the application use context, in which visualizations may be deployed to achieve specific discourse purposes with their users Along this dimension we distinguish between visualizations that serve primarily informational purposes (e.g., showing consumption data to evoke emotional responses in the users, for instance to motivate them). The remainder of this paper is devoted to the categories of different visualizations we have identified
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