Visualizing energy consumption activities as a tool for making everyday life more sustainable

Abstract

The need to analyze and understand energy consumption in relation to households’ activity patterns is vital for developing policy means that contribute to an energy efficient life and what people would deem as a “good” everyday life. To do this we need to learn more about how energy use is a part of everyday life; this article contributes to that objective. We use the time-geographic diary approach together with interviews to analyze everyday life as a totality. From household members’ time diaries, we can analyze and learn about when, where, and what energy-related activities occur in a household context and by whom (and in what social context) they are performed. We discuss the importance of relating information and feedback to households’ everyday activities, in order to make it relevant to households. Through our method we discover and visualize activity patterns in a household during a given period. The method is also useful to households as a reflective tool when discussing families’ daily lives in relation to energy consumption. The method gives direct feedback to households and the information is relevant since it emanates from their own reported activities.