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TITLE: SFU SIAT Facluty - Visual Awareness for Home Energy Control
CLIENT:
Drs. Lyn Bartram (SIAT), Rob Woodbury (SIAT)
CONTACT:
lyn@sfu.ca
OVERVIEW:
Simon Fraser University, the University of Waterloo and Ryerson University have joined together under the name “Team North” to design and build a 100% solar powered home for the Canadian climate. The objective of the project is to significantly reduce energy consumption and green house gas emissions from new residential building construction. Team North's proposal, entitled “North House,” is a unique fusion of architecture, solar power and mobile and interactive technologies. The goal of this project is to explore visualization approaches that can be used in a variety of interfaces to the underlying electrical/mechanical systems in an adaptive home control system for monitoring and managing energy use.
PROJECT GOALS:
Effective energy reduction programs necessitate not only efficient buildings, but approaches that aid occupants in modifying their energy use behaviors. North House employs technologies that realize both better building performance and simplify the task of measuring, visualizing and understanding energy use while providing a reward for energy reducing behaviors. Current systems for understanding energy use at the individual/consumer level still rely on engineering displays and models that require the person to understand intimately how the technology itself works: analogous to having to understand the principle of internal combustion to be able to drive a car. The overall goals of the project are to identify new approaches to allowing home occupants to actually manage and adapt their energy use and energy systems without forcing them to develop engineering knowledge that drives the systems.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The focus of this project is to identify, design and empirically examine different visualization approaches for a variety of interfaces under development in North House: from ambient overall displays to more specific resources (such as on an appliance).
For more information on the project and the people involved, please see http://www.siat.sfu.ca/research/projects/55/.
DELIVERABLES:
We anticipate that this project will involve both design and experimentation. The main focus of the project is a set of usable visualizations that have been at least initially validated with users (some of these will include integration and comparison with previously developed approaches by other members of the team). Deliverables will include: weekly or bi-weekly meeting status reports, design requirements document, visualizations specification document, concept design, design mock-ups, experimental design, execution and reports.
SKILLS REQUIRED:
A well rounded team with members from interaction design, visual design, informatics and programming is required for this project. See key roles required:
- Project management (e.g., scheduling, documentation, resource allocation)
- Visual and interaction design (e.g., design and coding of visual display prototypes
- Experiment design and execution
- Programming (Java, Flash and mySQL for experiment platforms: Excel and stats packages for experiment analysis; video annotation coding as required)
- Quality assurance (iterative user-centred design including formative user testing)