In this paper we present the design and evaluation of the Temperature Calendar -- a visualization of temperature variation within a workplace over the course of the past week. This highlights deviation from organizational temperature policy, and aims to bring staff "into the loop" of understanding and managing heating, and so reduce energy waste. The display was deployed for three weeks in five public libraries. Analysis of interaction logs, questionnaires and interviews shows that staff used the displays to understand heating in their buildings, and took action reflecting this new understanding. Bringing together our results, we discuss design implications for workplace displays, and an analysis of carbon emissions generated in constructing and operating our design. More in general, the findings helped us to reflect on the role of policy on energy consumption, and the potential for the HCI community to engage with its application, as well as its definition or modification.

This paper presents findings from a co-design project that aims to augment the practices of professional energy advisors with environmental data from sensors deployed in clients' homes. Premised on prior ethnographic observations we prototyped a sensor platform to support the work of tailoring advice-giving to particular homes. We report on the deployment process and the findings to emerge, particularly the work involved in making sense of or accounting for the data in the course of advice-giving. Our ethnomethodological analysis focuses on the ways in which data is drawn upon as a resource in the home visit, and how understanding and advice-giving turns upon unpacking the indexical relationship of the data to the situated goings-on in the home. This insight, coupled with further design workshops with the advisors, shaped requirements for an interactive system that makes the sensor data available for visual inspection and annotation to support the situated sense-making that is key to giving energy advice.

Most work around technological interventions for energy conservation to date has focussed on changing individual behaviour. Hence, there is limited understanding of communal settings, such as office environments, as sites for intervention. Even when energy consumption in the workplace has been considered, the emphasis has typically been on the individual. To address this gap, we conducted a study of energy consumption and management in one workplace, based on a combination of workshops with a broad range of stakeholders, and quantitative data inspections. We report and discuss findings from this study, in light of prior literature, and we present a set of implications for design and further research. In particular, three themes, and associated intervention opportunities, emerged from our data: (1) energy wastage related to “errors”; (2) the role of company policies and the negotiation that surrounds their implementation; and (3) the bigger energy picture of procurement, construction and travel.

The availability of low-power Wi-Fi radio modules opens up opportunities to leverage the existing prevalent Wi-Fi infrastructure for large-scale trials and deployments of Ubicomp technology. In this paper we address the challenge of supporting end-users, especially when they are not technical experts, in connecting new low-power, low-cost Wi-Fi devices with very minimal UIs to an existing, secure Wi-Fi infrastructure. We report two usability studies through which 30 participants, with no formal technical training, compared 4 alternative configuration techniques, selected based on cost and consumption constraints, and on adoption in off-the-shelf products. Through an analysis of success rate and causes of failure, our results indicate that two techniques are noticeably more usable than others. These are a web-based configuration mechanism, where users connect to an access point on the Wi-Fi device, and one that makes use of a standard audio cable to connect a smartphone to the device to be configured.

Large arrays of cameras are increasingly being employed for producing high quality image sequences needed for motion analysis research. This leads to the logistical problem with coordination and control of a large number of cameras. In this paper, we used a lightweight multi-agent system for coordinating such camera arrays. The agent framework provides more than a remote sensor access API. It allows reconfigurable and transparent access to cameras, as well as software agents capable of intelligent processing. Furthermore, it eases maintenance by encouraging code reuse. Additionally, our agent system includes an automatic discovery mechanism at startup, and multiple language bindings. Performance tests showed the lightweight nature of the framework while validating its correctness and scalability. Two different camera agents were implemented to provide access to a large array of distributed cameras. Correct operation of these camera agents was confirmed via several image processing agents.