Energy provides heating, lighting and more, but it affects the environment. In Europe, households account for 25% of the energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Residential energy feedback could contribute to 5%–10% energy consumption reduction, but there are several barriers including those related to user behaviour. Visualisations of energy costs and savings are not enough: interventions must be tailored, frequent and engaging.

Our novel approach will employ sound. We will design, develop and evaluate real-time digital sonic interactions as augmentations of individual appliances and aggregated smart meters' outputs, which will promote energy efficiency in the household. Without adding to the myriad of “beeps” in our life, we will create new everyday sounds meant to be felt, implicitly understood, rather than listened to. Our procedural audio models, which can be embedded and personalized, will be based on our research on sound, interaction design, behavior change, and energy. The project benefits from access to high-resolution energy data of the KTH Live-in Lab and its individual and shared spaces for testing. 

A few references:

- Bertoldi, Paolo. "Overview of the European Union policies to promote more sustainable behaviours in energy end-users." Energy and Behaviour. Academic Press, 2020. 451-477. 

- Pauletto, S., Cambridge, H., Rudnicki, R. (2014) Proceedings of the SoniHED Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data: https://www.kth.se/profile/pauletto/page/sonihed

- Yolande Strengers. 2014. Smart Energy in Everyday Life: Are you Designing for Resource Man? Interactions 21, 4: 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2621931

- Shafqat, O., et al. "Per-appliance energy feedback as a moving target." 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, ICT4S 2019; Lappeenranta; Finland; 10 June 2019 through 14 June 2019. Vol. 2382. CEUR-WS, 2019.

- Wangel, J., et al. "Vitiden: Transforming a policy-orienting scenario to a practice-oriented energy fiction." Futures 112 (2019): 102440.

- Tom Hargreavesn, Michael Nye, and Jacquelin Burgess. 2010. Making energy visible: A qualitative field study of how householders interact with feedback from smart energy monitors. Energy Policy 38, 10: 6111–6119.