Utility Management Made Easy
By Sierra Lee, Yu Hao Wong, Tyler Nguyen
Problem and Solution Overview
Our idea is centered around helping people reduce utility waste in their homes. While this can refer to a variety of different things, we are primarily focused on utilities such as air conditioning, heat, and lighting. Our proposed solution is an analytics and monitoring app with IoT solutions. This solution aims to tackle the problem of sustainability at the root by exposing metrics and analytics of energy consumption of users directly, and it is centered around a smart plug that can measure and report energy usage to the end-user of the application.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
We wanted to focus our research on residents in the Seattle area. This is because we are based in Seattle (making finding participants easier), and because Seattle is interesting in terms of utility usage in particular due to its recent weather (hot during the day, cold at night). As we wanted to make sure we were able to properly reach many types of Seattle residents (some of which may be very busy with work or school), we decided that a survey would be optimal for our first design research method. Surveys can be easily distributed online, so we were able to reach out to a diverse group of participants (students, adults out of school, and adults with families). With this, we were able to get lots of diverse data (a high level understanding of people’s struggles with utility usage) from 18 residents without requiring them to take too much time out of their day. Our second design research method was a dairy study where participants recorded their utility usage over a 48 hour period. We chose a diary study because it can be hard for people to remember their utility usage off the top of their head like in a survey, so we were able to get much more detailed data. We were able to get three participants for our diary study with two of them being UW students and all three being apartment dwellers. It was more difficult for us to recruit participants for this compared to the surveys, so our participants were limited to people that we personally knew.
Design Research Results and Themes
There were quite a few themes that emerged from both our survey and diary journal results. For one, we saw that, while energy waste is a common issue among people, tackling this issue is currently too complicated for most people to want to make a change. Oftentimes, this energy waste is due to people not knowing what strategies to use to conserve energy. For example, we had one participant cite that they were not sure whether using a dishwasher or washing dishes by hand was more energy efficient. Others cited more personal complaints: one participant mentioned that they feel like they constantly turn on the heat, but not high enough for it to make a difference. A similar pain point we observed was that many users could tell they were not efficiently using their utilities but had no idea how to fix it. For example, many of our participants who had central AC/heating cited they spent most of their time in 1–2 rooms, acknowledging that they were unnecessarily controlling the temperature of rooms they did not frequently spend extended periods of time in.
Another theme we observed was that people often struggle with physically managing their utilities. Take the case where someone feels cold as they are getting ready for bed. They will likely turn on the heat before going to sleep. However, their place will likely be properly warmed up long before they wake up in the morning. This may cause the user to wake up too warm in the middle of the night and unnecessarily waste energy. Some heating systems have timer mechanisms, but oftentimes users don’t know how long they should leave their heat on. Some systems also will only heat up to a certain temperature, but users may also have trouble discerning what the ideal temperature is (and sometimes these thermostats are not accurate in measuring the temperature of all rooms in a home). This problem can also be seen in the case where a user accidentally leaves a utility on as they leave their home. There is no mainstream way for them to be alerted and remotely turn off their utilities. Currently, if a user accidentally leaves a utility on, they will just accept that they have wasted energy and money once they get back home and realize their mistake.
As we’ve seen, a lack of transparency seems to be the root of many of the pain points users experience when it comes to utility usage and waste: users aren’t aware of the best ways they can more efficiently use their utilities. To further expand on this, lack of transparency into utility usage may also cause frustration in shared households. Some of the participants we surveyed lived with roommates or their parents, and they all mentioned how some sort of detailed breakdown into how each person in the household uses utilities would be helpful. An example case could be a house of roommates realizing their energy bill is quite high. Some of the roommates may use utilities far less than others, probably warranting the higher-use roommates to pay a little more. Currently, there is no good way to track this per-person utility usage.
With these themes, we decided to strive for a design that both educated users and gave them tangible ways to make a change in their utility usage and waste.
Proposed Design
After extensive user research, some commonly recurring themes were identified that tie into common pain points that our users experience. Particularly, there is a notable lack of awareness on energy use from a data standpoint, where a monthly utility bill with a singular total usage metric only presents an opaque overview of a user’s consumption, creating a barrier to knowledge in this area, even when users strive to become more sustainable in their actions. Additionally, the difficulty and inconvenience of actually adapting a lifestyle to becoming more energy-sustainable has been highlighted as something that our solution can address.
Our solution is designed around these aforementioned pain-points, and provides a smart-home suite that intelligently gathers and aggregates data on home energy consumption, user-behavior and external factors to present informative and accessible metrics for our end users. We then support users in making actionable changes by providing a smart home plugin system via IoT enabled hardware.
With the application, users are able to monitor and control their energy consumption with higher granularity. They are able to adapt their usage patterns based on provided recommendations and set up automation routines to optimize usage. The IoT hardware aims to provide a lower-cost alternative to replacing appliances en-masse, improving hardware sustainability as well.
