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Transformations University of Lincoln

Project Name: Killawhats

Lead Institution: University of Lincoln

Project Lead: Derek Foster

 

To design,deploy, and evaluate an effective student-led energy intervention for official student accommodation blocks, using cutting edge interaction design methods to produce design implications and guidelines for other institutions to adopt in their sustainability strategies.


See the full Transformations programme playlist

 

Background

Sustainability interventions that aim to motivate and engage students in eco-friendly behaviour who live in official halls of residence to face a number of unique problems, particularly around the use of energy as a finite resource [4]. Specifically, a large portion of UK university student accommodation provides utilities such as electricity, water and gas at fixed cost as part of tenancy contracts. Official student accommodation at the University of Lincoln (UoL) provides non-metered electricity as part of tenancy contracts. With the absence of financial motivators, energy interventions for special consumer groups such as students require a robust understanding of their perspectives of resource consumption in terms of responsibility and how to design and support successful technology-led energy interventions. The findings of this case study to date include an analysis drawn from a large corpus of focus group, questionnaire and interview data involving over 100 students. The project was particularly inspired by findings from the JISC funded ‘Open to Change’ project carried out by Oxford University.

 

Aims and objectives

The objectives of the project aimed to:

 

  • Open up UoL’s energy consumption data and make it publicly available via an open application programmable interface (API), allowing third party access
  • Run a series of workshops with students as part of the curriculum at UoL to understand the design implications for energy interventions in student accommodation
  • Integrate findings from previous JISC 'Greening ICT' projects into KillaWhats interventions - ‘Open to Change (Oxford University)’ and ‘DUALL (De Montfort University)
  • Deploy live intervention trials adopting appropriate communication and media channels that will engage students with their energy consumption
  • Produce peer-reviewed research papers based on findings to disseminate with the wider sustainability research community

 

Context

The UoL, along with many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), acknowledges that climate change is a real and growing threat for countries, economies, and organisations in the public and private sector. The UoL is taking a strategic view of carbon emissions, and is contributing to HE sector and national commitments to reduce emissions of CO2.

 

The KillaWhats project aimed to contribute to the sustainability agenda at UoL by exploiting current smart-meter infrastructure in an innovative fashion; by engaging with its greatest asset – the students themselves. It is widely cited that technology-supported energy interventions can achieve up to 20% in reductions [2], even a modest 5% reduction across a large student population in official accommodation can save significant amounts of CO2 and cost.

 

The business case

Sustainability plays a key part in the aspirations of UoL becoming a Top 50 institution across a number of the UK university league tables. At present, UoL has achieved Top 50 status with the Guardian 2013 University Guide. A reduction of 29% annual carbon emission by has been set based on 2005/06 baseline emissions, with clear financial drivers from HEFCE, who have linked capital funding to performance monitored against  institutions’ realistic carbon reduction plans. In order to achieve this UoL aims to foster an environment that ‘proactively engages with staff and students to establish a campus culture where low carbon choices become the standard’. Therefore it is imperative UoL does not lag behind its peers and competitors in the sustainability space.

 

To be successful in achieving Top 50 status, student engagement strategies now sit at the core of many HEI’s, with UoL seeing much success in this area growing numbers of students. With growing numbers of students it becomes more challenging to meet its own target emissions. The KillaWhats project supports student engagement and is actively embedded within the curriculum, where the objectives of the project are presented as a challenge to each new intake of students within a taught 2nd year module.

 

Key drivers

The key drivers of KillaWhats were:

 

  1. To increase student engagement with sustainability on campus
  2. To support overarching UoL aspirations of becoming a Top 50 institution
  3. To help keep emissions in line with HEFCE reduction targets , with a 29% reduction target by 2017/18, based on UoL 2005/06 levels
  4. To help establish good reputation through publicly available ‘green’ performance and league tables
  5. To reduce energy costs at UoL, which currently sit at around £2m annually

 

JISC resources/technology used

Two JISC resources were identified as being useful to support the work of the project:

 

  1. Greening ICT Programme – Open to Change (OtC) project [3]
  2. Greening ICT Programme – DUALL project [1]

 

Open to Change

We used the findings from JISC’s ‘Open to Change’ project to inform how we would a) run our sustainability focus groups/workshops, b) understand best practice for an open energy data API implementation, b) understand how employees currently view energy consumption practices in an organisation, allowing us to compare to students, and c) understand how to incorporate engaging energy visualisation elements into prototype designs.

The OtC project provided a rich qualitative and quantitative account of employee perspectives on energy use and the effectiveness of current and potential interventions. With similarities between employees and students as participants in energy intervention (no cost incentive and no choice over equipment bought and used), many of the OtC findings could be mapped over to the KillaWhats project, particularly the competition and rewards elements of visualisation design.

 

DUALL

The findings from a secondary JISC resource, the DUALL project, were used to understand the implications behind designing, developing and deploying a software widget on desktop computers throughout a campus. For Killwatts it gave a head start in selecting an appropriate software/service platform in which to deploy an energy intervention to.

 

Outcomes

The following outcomes were delivered based on the project’s objectives:

 

  • Development of an open data API for UoL smart meter consumption data, allowing third party access to consumption data at 30min intervals using open formats, see appendix A for full API documentation
  • Produced design guidelines for student energy interventions, based on an analysis of focus group, questionnaire and interview data from over 100 students, see appendix B for images from the design and prototyping sessions with students
  • Redeveloped the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) undergraduate module at UoL to address the sustainability objectives of the project. The module presented a ‘design challenge’ based on the theme of sustainability with assessment work carried out using user-centred design methods to address the challenge. This is now part of the curriculum which is taught to 2nd years, see appendix C for module assessment documents
  • Developed an application framework for the Facebook platform that integrates guidelines from the OtC project for delivering energy feedback via technology (competition and rewards feedback), see figure 4. Additionally, the energy ‘data-gap’ issue highlighted first in the DUALL project, then identified at Lincoln was addressed by creating a simple algorithm to plug data gaps temporarily    
  • Authored a peer-reviewed paper and poster on understanding the design implications of student energy interventions, please see section ‘Peer-Reviewed Findings’ for more detail on this. The paper was presented at the prestigious CHI2013 conference in Paris, see appendix D for full paper and poster publication 

 

We were unable to deliver the desired outcomes of the below objective before the project deadline:

 

  • Deploy live intervention trials adopting appropriate communication and media channels that will engage students with their energy consumption

 

Full explanation for this is detailed in the Drawbacks and Key Lessons sections.

 

Achievements

A number of the project’s objectives were achieved starting with publishing (via an open API) UoL energy data. Open energy data access is a major issue in UK HEIs, previous research has shown that most university energy monitoring systems are closed, with constraints holding back easy access for developers. UoL was in this position and developed a novel approach to make the data open as shown in figure 1. Energy data was published to a REST API hosted on campus, and a secondary IoT (Internet of Things) cloud brokerage service. Interesting we were forced to use a range of old and modern technologies to open the data, from an analogue dialup modem to cutting edge cloud data storage services.

 

 

Figure 1-Energy monitoring software implementation for Killawhats

 

With access to the energy data we were then able to experiment with basic visualisations to first show overall energy consumption, see figure 2, and then focus on the students’ courts consumption feedback.

 



Figure 2 – Energy visualisation prototypes to demonstrate open data effectiveness

 

Central to project was the need to fully understand the student participants’ needs and desires when designing an energy intervention specifically for them. We achieved this by running a series of large scale focus groups which included a range of design activities including prototyping, questionnaires and interviews. Researchers on the project collected all the design data and performed a rigorous thematic analysis, this produced a set of guidelines demonstrating best practice for designing engaging student energy interventions. The analyses produced 4 central themes that need to be considered to engage students in energy interventions, namely Defining Cool, Competition, Accountability, and Social Practices. See figure 3 for a diagrammatic view of the themes.

 

 

Figure 3 –Student energy Intervention design themes from thematic analysis

 

With the energy data made accessible to developers and a thorough understanding of the intervention design space, the project was then able to develop a social media application to deliver the intervention. Taking the findings from the thematic analysis and visualisation design findings from the OtC project (peer pressure and competition) an basic application framework was developed for the Facebook platform. The application is the end point students would engage with, and provides bespoke energy feedback for each student accommodation block at UoL participating in the intervention. See figure 4 for a screenshot of the application.

 


 

Figure 4 - Screenshot of prototype intervention application designed for the Facebook platform

 

Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the project was engaging a large number of students (>100) in challenging sustainability issues. Students were driven to contribute to the design of an energy intervention they would participate in, and to submit high quality assessment coursework that supported the intervention. 

 

Benefits

The benefits to emerge from the project were:

 

  •  An understanding of how to ‘open-up’ campus smart-meter infrastructure and it’s potential to support campus wide energy interventions
  • Increased engagement with students and sustainability on campus
  • Improved student curriculum materials themed on sustainability issues
  • A thorough understanding on how to design energy interventions for special groups/communities, such as students, who are not responsible for costs

 

Peer-Reviewed Findings

After analysing the focus group, interview and questionnaire data produced by the students we had a very rich account of their perceptions of energy consumption in official accommodation. We also elicited a number of intervention themes from the data that provide a set of design implications and guidelines on how to design an engaging and successful energy intervention for students. Four main themes were identified as shown below, with supporting quotes from students:

 

Defining Cool: State of the art technology was deemed to be universally cool, as were social group activities such as membership of university sports and other specialist societies. 

 

Participant 1: “if something is cool, it’s obviously got something going for it so I will like try it and see what I think of it, but I won’t necessarily think it is cool because other people do.”

 

Participant 4: “anything cutting edge, modern and connected is right up there in terms of coolness, certainly things like tablets and smartphones”

 

Competition: This theme was in the form of gamification attributes such as leaderboards displaying student accommodation blocks’ consumption levels in a competitive. Other Competitive attributes included incentives such as vouchers as a reward for winning by using less energy.

 

Participant 6: “implement some sort of leader-board amongst friends and student blocks that could be published on Facebook or some other social networking sites, it’d be good as well as it’d encourage competition”

 

Participant 7: “if your flat saves a lot of energy, you get a food voucher towards the end of the year for 30 or 40 quid off at Morrisons or wherever. So, stuff like that people would want because it is useful.”

 

Accountability: This theme was discussed somewhat passionately in both a negative and positive light throughout the data and is closely linked to how an individual or group may ultimately engage or disengage with an energy intervention. Some of the data suggests when individuals aren't responsible for paying their energy costs they adopt the stance of disengagement with an intervention, even when rewards for savings are possible. The findings from this theme also show there are issues around responsibility for the wider environmental impact and the socio-economic factors of energy usage patterns when the resource can be consumed with no financial consequences.

 

Participant 8: “I don’t pay for it do don’t see any need to reduce.”

 

Participant 9: “I don’t currently care about my energy usage due to my fixed billed”

 

Participant 10: “the fact that we don’t have to pay just makes us like ‘meh, we might as well make the most of it”

 

Non-negotiability of energy use was a common sentiment, because of necessity of use:

 

Participant 11: I need most of my stuff on however it has shocked me how much I use

 

Participant 12: to be honest there isn’t much I could cut down on because as a gaming student I need a lot of electrical things”

 

Participant 13: “my heating is always on in my flat, and I mean always. It’s so cold here all the time.”


Social Practices: The theme of social practices highlighted many students use energy as a group for social activities such as watching movies, gaming and cooking. For the most part social practices were deemed enjoyable and not something to give up without good justification:

 

Participant 16: “It is a good thing to waste your time. You are watching one video and from then on you are 10 video’s down.”

 

Participant 17: “I cook for my flat-mates, so I use the oven almost every day, even though that means they don’t have to use it. That means I'd be doing worse at saving energy even if it’s not my fault.“

 

The four main design themes presented here are not exhaustive, there are also a number of first order themes (attributes that support the main themes) for granular intervention design. These are discussed further in the full paper in appendix D, with a diagrammatic overview in figure 3.

 

Drawbacks

The most significant issue the project experienced was the technical failure of the smart meter infrastructure at UoL. The smart meters underwent a refurbishment program from November 2012-January 2013, however it overran and experienced a number of technical failures. The impact of such a long period of downtime was particularly severe for the project as it meant we could not carry out the intervention phase of the project. We plan on running the intervention in the new academic year September 2013, beyond the project deadline. To date the smart meters are still not fully operational. 

 

Key lessons

The key lessons learnt from the project were:

 

  • To be directly involved in any technical planning of the smart-meter infrastructure at UoL if any project within out remit is dependent upon it. This is to provide technical consultancy on ensuring the infrastructure has redundancy in the event of failure, and to follow best practice implementation in making the energy consumption data open to third parties. Failure to be a key participant of any technical planning could impact heavily on projects that rely on a stream of energy consumption data. 
  • The importance of involving intervention participants at all stages of the design process.This is to ensure best possible buy-in and engagement levels in the intervention by students, thereby increasing the likelihood of success in raising awareness of, and reducing energy consumption. 
  • Keeping participants appraised of how their contribution to the project is being used. The students were very keen from the outset to see the results of their contribution in the intervention’s design in the real world, which intrinsically increased their engagement with the project. It also provided us with feedback in how we can improve curriculum content around sustainability issues. 
  • The importance of integrating sustainability themes in the student curriculumas many students simply don’t understand the implications as they have never been adequately informed. To help tackle this we plan on getting several students who have completed the module and the Killawhats design challenge to present their work to the next module cohort. Further to this, and to address the problem campus wide, we will showcase some of the Killawhats work throughout the sustainability open days during fresher’s week. This presents an opportunity to reach out to new students and raise sustainability issues from the very beginning of their time at UoL.

 

Project Feedback

On completion of the module and submission of their Killawhats design challenge coursework, students completed a standard module survey questionnaire. Results from the survey were overwhelmingly positive with many enjoying the challenge of attempting to provide a solution to a sustainability issue by applying technology in the design of an energy intervention.

 

Some of the student quotes below are from the survey question: "What did you like the most about the module?" 

 

"I found it very refreshing to study a module that was so insightful and beneficial. The whole nature of this module dealt with sustainability problems that are often overlooked when designing software applications, specialist devices etc. Having something like this in the curriculum would be undoubtedly beneficial further down the line when we leave university."

 

"I enjoyed learning about the different aspects within Human-Computer Interaction and how it can support environmental issues, thoroughly as a whole enjoyed the module. The lecturer was easy to follow and the content was interesting to research into."

 

Most of the students appear to have enjoyed studying under the theme of sustainability. As this was the first time we had attempted to directly involve a large number of students in real cutting edge research, we were pleased with how the delivery of content and practical workshops was received by the students. The positive feedback was fed back to the board of examiners annual meeting, who in turn were pleased with the module's feedback and student engagement levels. The module will be run again with a new cohort of students starting in September 2013 with the same Killawhats design challenge presented.

 

Looking ahead

With findings of the project to date positive and been through successful peer-review, the following tasks are planned to progress the project further:

 

  • carry out intervention studies for evaluation in during October-December 2013 and January-March 2014
  • another paper is already underway for submission to CHI 2014, the paper will disseminate research findings in the form of robust and descriptive design guidelines for student energy interventions
  • the project's sustainability design challenge will be run as part of the curriculum in Computer Science from September 2013 with a new cohort of students (over 100) 

 

References

  1. Bull, Richard (2011) Deliberative user approach in a living lab (DUALL) JISC Project
  2. Darby, S. (2006) The Effectiveness of Feedback on Energy Consumption
  3. Noble, Howard (2011) Open to Change JISC project
  4. Odom, W., Pierce, J., and Roedl, D. Social Incentive & Eco-Visualization Displays: Toward Persuading Greater Change in Dormitory Communities. In Proc. OZCHI (2008) Conference.

 

Appendix A - Open Energy Data API Documentation.pdf

Appendix B - Student Design & Prototyping Session Images.pdf

Appendix C - Sustainability Cirriculum Development.pdf

Appendix D - Peer-reviewed CHI2013 paper.pdf