Household energy use data may contain sensitive inferences into family life, yet its potential for surveillance is imperfectly understood. To explore this space, we developed Household Wattch, a speculative eco-feedback ‘provotype’ that profiles households according to their energy use data. Evaluated by 16 participants from Australian households engaged in an 18-month energy use monitoring trial, Household Wattch elicited users’ perceptions and expectations about a near future where energy use data is a useful yet potentially sensitive commodity when analysed. We highlight challenges and opportunities for energy use data across three scales: (1) Within the household, (2) Beyond the household (e.g., sharing energy data with third parties) and (3) Post-household (e.g., what happens to energy data when a household re-configures or disbands). Findings suggest users may require support in understanding the sensitivities of their energy use data, particularly when deciding whether to share it with third parties. Opportunities exist for accidental or deliberate surveillance via energy use data, and these need to be identified and managed. Provotypes represent a useful tool for navigating this space, and we provide considerations for how they can support users in speculating over possible energy futures.

As participatory design approaches proliferate into mainstream industry practice, it becomes important for designers to consider how design tools, methods and practices can be made more accessible for non-designers — fostering participatory mindsets. We explore how materiality and familiarity of design tools impact participation, by investigating an off-the-shelf, familiar material — the Rubik's Cube, for application possibilities as an unconventional design tool. We report on a series of workshops with design practitioners and educators, that find disassociating design methods from traditional materials, opens new possibilities for methodological innovations, while revealing promising avenues to improve participation. We categorise findings into three themes: material properties, staging considerations, and emergent practices. This is supplemented by two Illustrative examples of emergent applications of using Rubik's Cubes to augment (1) de Bono's random input method; and (2) creating dynamic persona states. The emergent applications present new material possibilities enabling design methods to innovate and evolve.

The global education landscape continues to be disrupted by COVID-19. The unique circumstances created by this crisis has led to unexpected opportunities to leverage innovative uses of technologies that can radically innovate education service delivery. We map out the context of Pakistan – a country where challenges pertaining to both access to education and quality learning predate the pandemic. A context largely under explored in design and HCI research. This paper presents insights from conversations with 21 stakeholders across 15 design activities, that were structured around speculative design proposals to collaboratively envision the future of education in Pakistan. The paper offers directions for the design of EdTech through a plural, and culturally rooted speculative discussion, highlighting (1) opportunities and considerations for localising design for education, and (2) reframing the value of education in Pakistan.

Smart energy technologies provide new opportunities for network demand management, while generating data that can provide inference into household activities and which is increasingly valuable for user profiling and targeted marketing. This paper explores the human values implicated by smart energy technologies as energy consumption emerges as a potentially sensitive and attributable data trail. Using a values-based approach involving semi-structured interviews with 39 Australians, we use speculative design to engage participants with the implications of high frequency household energy data and understand users’ values and attitudes towards curtailment, surveillance, accountability and consent. The principal contributions are (1) a nuanced understanding of user values around privacy, responsibility, trust, collectivism and curtailment in relation to interpersonal household energy use data and considerations for speculative designs in this space, and (2) reflections on the design of mechanisms for consumer participation in demand response for energy networks.

Data collection from users' interactions with ubiquitous computing is a wicked problem for design. Despite legislation increasingly requiring "informed" consent, the apathy born from a constant bombardment of consent notifications means many users remain largely uninformed about the collection, manipulation and dissemination of their personal information. We explore existing semiotics as signposts that inform individual decisions, and report from a design activity where participants mapped out their daily personal data trails. Using these as inspiration we explore how to engage users with new or emergent data trails. This pictorial provides a visual argument for (1) engaging users with whole data trails, which may yield greater benefit than the optimisation of individual notifications, and (2) how a whole data trail perspective may be valuable in the development of semiotic conventions for acquainting users with emergent (future) data trails.

The role of design in organizations has risen in prominence since the turn of the century. Our collective understanding of this role, identification of designerly practices, and ability to trace their value and influence within an organizational landscape however remains problematic. Both industry and academia have made distinct efforts to study design in practice, acknowledging the importance of the value of design as a competitive instrument but with little agreement on how it is understood, communicated and operationalised. This paper takes a pragmatic orientation, exploring the contemporary challenges design practitioners face in terms of documenting, accounting for and communicating the value of designerly work. We adopt a bottom-up approach, conducting 11 semi-structured interviews with design practitioners, to study how practitioners in situ negotiate the design-value space. Our findings present design value communication strategies, how design knowledge is consumed, what documentation practices are used, and the organizational challenges encountered.

Poor indoor air quality (IAQ) can affect health and cognitive performance prior to users becoming aware of the declining air quality. Yet office occupants rarely have access to IAQ information upon which to base their ventilation decisions. This paper details the design and deployment of a situated IAQ display as a probe to explore ventilation and building operation practices when IAQ information is made available. Based on deployments in 11 naturally ventilated offices, we present an analysis of how reflection and sense making around IAQ can inform interactions with buildings. We suggest displays that are locally situated, non-disruptive and visualise the effects of poor IAQ with human analogies may hold potential for engaging office occupants with IAQ. We highlight how ambient displays represent a stepping-stone towards more informed interactions which can improve air quality and cognitive performance, and how IAQ feedback may usefully contribute to alternative HCI research agendas such as Human-Building Interaction.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a challenging subject to study due to its highly multidisciplinary nature and the fast change of advancing technology. Keeping pace with these changes requires innovation in pedagogical approach, such as student-authored video, which is presented here. In case studies from two UK universities, students were assessed on video making. The results suggest increased student engagement and satisfaction, as well as acquisition of design skills taught in HCI, not typically taught elsewhere in computer science. Here we share our experiences of using this practice along with key challenges and some preliminary findings from analysis of the student artefact-creation process. We also outline future research directions in this space.

In this article, we address the interrelated challenges of predicting user comfort and using this to reduce energy consumption in smart heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. At present, such systems use simple models of user comfort when deciding on a set-point temperature. Being built using broad population statistics, these models generally fail to represent individual users’ preferences, resulting in poor estimates of the users’ preferred temperatures. To address this issue, we propose the Bayesian Comfort Model (BCM). This personalised thermal comfort model uses a Bayesian network to learn from a user’s feedback, allowing it to adapt to the users’ individual preferences over time. We further propose an alternative to the ASHRAE 7-point scale used to assess user comfort. Using this model, we create an optimal HVAC control algorithm that minimizes energy consumption while preserving user comfort. Through an empirical evaluation based on the ASHRAE RP-884 dataset and data collected in a separate deployment by us, we show that our model is consistently 13.2% to 25.8% more accurate than current models and how using our alternative comfort scale can increase our model’s accuracy. Through simulations we show that using this model, our HVAC control algorithm can reduce energy consumption by 7.3% to 13.5% while decreasing user discomfort by 24.8% simultaneously.

Smart thermostats offer impressive scope for adapting to users' thermal comfort preferences and saving energy in shared work environments. Yet human interactions with smart thermostats thus far amount to an assumption from designers that users are willing and able to provide unbiased data at regular intervals; which may be unrealistic. In this paper we highlight the variety of social factors which complicate users' relationships with smart thermostats in shared work environments. These include social dynamics, expectations, and contextually specific factors that influence motivations for interaction with the system. In response we outline our framework towards a Smarter Thermostat: one which better accounts for these messy social inevitabilities, is equipped for a decline in user feedback over time and one which augments rather than attempts to replaces human intelligence- thereby ensuring a smarter thermostat does not create dumber humans.

This article contends that problems such as poverty and economic disadvantage are equally social in their nature as they are economic. As such, a social frame of reference is helpful in design. Using a qualitative approach, the authors studied the ways that 13 Australian households living on a low income manage, organize, and interact in their everyday financial activities and what this means for designers of technology that might assist them with this. The article highlights the highly social nature of many practices concerned with managing and saving money. Implications are provided for how these practices may be supported through fostering social connections and how informal and sharing economies may be leveraged to provide value to those experiencing financial hardship. An argument is made that classifying an otherwise heterogeneous population based on income alone is reductive. In response, the authors propose a rationale for amending the “low income” demographic classifier, incorporating a broader measure they tentatively term Social–financial Connectedness, which captures the importance of social connections in overall financial well-being and identifies people’s capacity to live well and share, irrespective of their financial circumstances.

In this paper we discuss results of a field study focused on understanding the ways money and financial issues are handled within family settings. Families develop 'systems' or methods through which they coordinate and manage their everyday financial activities. Through an analysis of our fieldwork data collected from fifteen families, we provide several examples of such systems, highlighting their qualities and illustrating how such systems come to support the handling of financial activities in the home. Our results show that these systems are developed with a careful consideration of familial values, relationships and routines; and incorporate the use of physical and digital tools. Consequently, we suggest that design should consider the use and non-use of technology when supporting household financial management, taking into account the richness of families' existing organically formed practices surrounding financial systems. Finally, our findings point to the fact that financial management in the domestic setting is socially organized and is closely connected to supporting everyday household activities.