One of the great societal challenges that we face today concerns the move to more sustainable patterns of energy consumption, reflecting the need to balance both individual consumer choice and societal demands. In order for this ‘energy turnaround’ to take place, however, reducing residential energy consumption must go beyond using energy-efficient devices: More sustainable behaviour and lifestyles are essential parts of future ‘energy aware’ living. Addressing this issue from an HCI perspective, this paper presents the results of a 3-year research project dealing with the co-design and appropriation of a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that has been rolled out in a living lab setting with seven households for a period of 18 months. Our HEMS is inspired by feedback systems in Sustainable Interaction Design and allows the monitoring of energy consumption in real-time. In contrast to existing research mainly focusing on how technology can persuade people to consume less energy (‘what technology does to people’), our study focuses on the appropriation of energy feedback systems (‘what people do with technology’) and how newly developed practices can become a resource for future technology design. Therefore, we deliberately followed an open research design. In keeping with this approach, our study uncovers various responses, practices and obstacles of HEMS use. We show that HEMS use is characterized by a number of different features. Recognizing the distinctive patterns of technology use in the different households and the evolutionary character of that use within the households, we conclude with a discussion of these patterns in relation to existing research and their meaning for the design of future HEMSs.

We present the design and evaluation of a lightweight mobile S.O.S. system that facilitates ad-hoc communication between first responders and victims in emergency situations. Our approach leverages established protocols and standards in unforeseen ways to provide a platform supporting the creation of short-lived communication links. The system comprises two mobile applications: one victim application that allows the broadcasting of distress signals by a novel use of Wi-Fi SSIDs; and a responder application that allows first responders to discover and trace the people broadcasting the signals. The main difference of our system with other platforms enabling communication in crisis situations is that our system is independent from existing network infrastructure and runs on off-the-shelf, commercially available smartphones. We describe the results of our evaluation process in the context of both a design evaluation during a real-world emergency response exercise and of two user workshops in preparation for an upcoming large-scale exercise.

This paper presents results of a three-year research project focused on the emplacement of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) in a living lab setting with seven households. The HEMS used in this study allowed householders to monitor energy consumption both in real-time and in retrospective on the TV and on mobile devices. Contrasting with existing research focused on how technology persuades people to consume less energy, our study uses a grounded approach to analyze HEMS emplacement. As an important result, we present here the issue of 'energy literacy'. Our study reveals that, by using HEMS, participants became increasingly literate in understanding domestic electricity consumption. We discuss the role HEMS played in that process and how the acquired literacy changed energy consumption patterns. We conclude that literacy in energy consumption has value on its own and explain how eco feedback system designs can benefit from this understanding.

Triage is the process of sorting patients by order of treatment necessity in large scale emergencies. Usually, a paper tag is attached to each patient containing their classification and the results of an initial, quick diagnosis. Several projects have aimed to electronically augment the process by using ubiquitous computing components. In this paper we present drawbacks of introducing technology to the process, which have not been discussed elsewhere, based on an extensive set of expert workshops discussing the employment of technology in triage with the aid of technology probes. Our main finding is that the common set of functionalities of electronic triage systems involves unwanted reconfiguration of triage processes. By presenting a set of implications for the design of these mobile technologies, we show how potential negative effects can be mitigated.

Reacting to the discussion on global warming, the HCI community has started to explore the design of tools to support responsible energy consumption. An important part of this research focuses on motivating energy savings by providing feedback tools which present consumption metrics interactively. In this line of work, the configuration of feedback has been mainly discussed using cognitive or behavioral factors. This narrow focus, however, misses a highly relevant perspective for the design of technology that supports sustainable lifestyles: to investigate the multiplicity of forms in which individuals or collectives actually consume energy. In this article, we broaden this focus, by taking a phenomenological lens to study how people use off-the-shelf eco-feedback systems in private households to make energy consumption accountable and explainable. By reconstructing accounting practices, we delineate several constitutive elements of the phenomenon of energy usage in daily life. We complement these elements with a description of the sophisticated methods used by people to organize their energy practices and to give a meaning to their energy consumption. We describe these elements and methods, providing examples coming from the fieldwork and uncovering observed strategies to account for consumption. Based on our results, we provide a critical perspective on existing eco-feedback mechanisms and describe several elements for a design rationale for designing support for responsible energy consumption. We argue that interactive feedback systems should not simply be an end, but rather a resource for the construction of the artful practice of making energy consumption accountable.

Long acquisition times are still a limitation for many applications of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), specially in 3-D and dynamic imaging. Several undersampling reconstruction techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem. These techniques are based on acquiring less samples than specified by the Nyquist criterion and estimating the nonacquired data by using some sort of prior information. Most of these reconstruction methods use prior information based on estimations of the pixel intensities of the images and therefore they are prone to introduce spatial or temporal blurring. Instead of using the pixel intensities, we propose to use information that allows us to sort the pixels of an image from darkest to brightest. The set of order relations which sort the pixels of an image has been called intensity order. The intensity order of an image can be estimated from low-resolution images, adjacent slices in volumetric acquisitions, temporal correlation in dynamic sequences or from prior reconstructions. Our technique for reconstruction using intensity order (TRIO) consists of looking for an image that satisfies the intensity order and minimizes the discrepancy between the acquired and reconstructed data. Results show that TRIO can effectively reconstruct 2-D-cine cardiac MR images (under-sampling factor of 4), estimating correctly the temporal evolution of the objects. Furthermore, TRIO is used as a second stage reconstruction after reconstructing with other techniques, keyhole, sliding window and k-t BLAST, to estimate the order information. In all cases the images are improved by TRIO.

Ambiguity has been identified as a useful tool for designing ubicomp systems. In the design of safety critical systems, however, the expectations for a system are particularly high, and goals of the technology are rigidly defined. In this context is not clear if open ended systems can still be used as a tool for design. In this paper we present a detailed account of the design process of an indoor wayfinding support tool for firefighters, in which ambiguity played a central role in driving the construction of the system. Based on an ongoing work covering more than a year of close collaboration with a heterogeneous team of project partners, we present some implications of using ambiguity for designing ubiquitous computing solutions in a domain that traditionally requires more formal specifications for the construction of technology.

This paper presents a new perspective for the design of indoor navigation support. In contrast to technology oriented approaches coming from Context Awareness research, we argue for a wider focus that complements the technical question of providing precise indoor location with the development of more effective navigation practices based on technology available today. Starting from research on indoor navigation conducted with the Paris Fire Brigade, we present two design concepts aimed at supporting firefighters in creating and finding their own paths, together with some of the design strategies that informed the creation of these concepts.

S.184-192