Toward improving building user energy awareness

Raising awareness of users' energy consumption in non-residential buildings like offices or universities is an essential step toward a global decrease of energy use. A popular solution is to have a visual dashboard with general information about energy use on display to the public. While easy to implement, such solutions have been shown to not be very engaging for people and thus, mostly ignored. In this paper, we investigate the use of a mobile application as an alternative solution to a dashboard display, to increase energy awareness of building occupants. The application takes the form of a daily quiz about the building's energy consumption. We evaluate our solution in a field study in which we compare it to a dashboard display. Our results suggest that while both solutions increased energy awareness when used, and more generally the understanding of the building's energy behaviour, the mobile application was more engaging.