Illuminating energy: smart lights, householders and intuitive energy data visualization

Interventions aiming to shift household energy consumption patterns commonly involve the provision of energy feedback. This feedback typically constitutes detailed numerical data regarding energy generation, consumption and price, and is communicated via energy monitors, apps, and other smart devices. Yet for a number of reasons both the concept of energy feedback and its implementation are rather problematic. Most significantly, interventions commonly depend on the ability of laypeople to interpret often complex and unfamiliar numerical information, as well as use, and regularly engage with, the various devices which communicate the feedback data. Moreover, by emphasising the perceived importance of data expressed in units like kilowatts and kilowatt hours, conventional feedback interventions inadvertently serve to displace the intuitive ways in which householders already engage with, and understand, energy. While the impetus to communicate energy feedback remains, there is nonetheless an evident need to do so in a more accessible manner. Drawing on preliminary findings from an ethnographic research project, this paper considers the opportunities for smart lights to visually communicate energy feedback in an intelligible and meaningful way that builds on, rather than overlooks, laypeople's existing capacities.