Neighbourhood Wattch: Using Speculative Design to Explore Values Around Curtailment and Consent in Household Energy Interactions

Paper Title

Neighbourhood Watch: Using Speculative Design to Explore Values Around Curtailment and Consent in Household Energy Interactions

Paper Information

• Research Domain: Human-Computer Interaction Design, Human Values, and Smart Energy Technologies
• Keywords: Energy usage, privacy, consent, values, smart energy, energy curtailment, IoT

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues or Challenges:

  1. Smart energy technologies reveal household activities through high-resolution data recording, leading to privacy risks.
  2. Energy data may be used for surveillance, profiling, and targeted marketing.
  3. Frequent use of household energy data may raise social and privacy concerns, yet users lack sufficient awareness of these potential consequences.

• Significance: The sensitivity and potential value of energy usage data make it a key topic in contemporary smart technology applications, particularly in the fields of fairness, privacy protection, and user-centered design.

• Research Motivation and Related Work: The authors aim to place users at the center of future smart energy design, exploring human values such as privacy, responsibility, trust, community collaboration, and energy curtailment. This work seeks to address gaps in research on energy data privacy and social impacts, designing mechanisms that enhance user awareness and participation in energy-related decision-making.

Solution

• Methods and Solutions:

  1. Employing a value-driven research approach combined with speculative design to provoke user reflection on privacy and social responsibility issues in smart energy technologies.
  2. Utilizing the "Neighbourhood Wattch" (NW) application as a speculative design project to simulate the potential for public sharing of household energy data, prompting users to deeply consider privacy, the meaning of shared data, and responsibility.

• Innovative Aspects: Introducing a novel framework that uses speculative design to help users understand the societal and privacy issues associated with high-frequency energy data scenarios.

• Implementation Steps and Techniques:

  1. Recruiting 39 Australian household users, including owners of rooftop solar panels and energy storage batteries.
  2. Conducting semi-structured interviews and presenting low-fidelity prototype applications (including fine-grained energy usage data visualizations).
  3. Analyzing participant feedback through thematic analysis and card-sorting activities to uncover relevant values and attitudes.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  1. Developed a nuanced understanding of the privacy impacts of household energy usage data, including user reflections on values such as trust, responsibility, privacy, community collaboration, and energy curtailment.
  2. Provided constructive recommendations for designing data collection and user engagement mechanisms in smart energy technologies.

• Advantages Over Existing Solutions: By employing speculative design, the study preemptively revealed privacy risks and social challenges associated with high-resolution energy data, capturing the complexity of user value attitudes more effectively than traditional technical approaches.

• Experimental Results and Evaluation:

  1. Participants demonstrated limited awareness of the potential privacy impacts of high-resolution household energy data.
  2. Public supervision of energy data (e.g., through the NW application) was highly contentious.
  3. Only a minority of participants expressed willingness to voluntarily reduce energy consumption to support energy network management.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. Participants were predominantly older, with younger families and multi-unit residential users underrepresented.
  2. Future research should include more dynamic household scenarios (e.g., rental or shared living environments).
  3. Expand exploration of other value collection methods, such as long-term diary studies or living lab experiments.