Visualising the Smart Home: Creative Engagement with Customer Data - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Visualising the Smart Home: Creative Engagement with Customer Data Graham Dove Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice City University London Graham.Dove.1@city.ac.uk

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Outline • Background • Possible Responses • Data Visualisation • Creativity • Research Case Study • Conclusions • Questions

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Background • Smart Homes, Smart Grid and distributed small scale generation massively increase the importance of data to the energy market • Demand management increases in complexity • Consumption data changes in scale from every quarter of the year to every quarter of an hour • Existing customer feedback devices are limited in their effectiveness and ambition • The ability to collect data has advanced faster than our understanding of how it can be used effectively

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Possible Responses Algorithmic solutions Human creativity

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Algorithmic Paternalism • Automating responses based on past behaviour or data thresholds • Demonstrated in Facebook and Google personalisation which presents people with vastly different information • Eli Pariser has called this the “Filter Bubble” • May 6 th 2010 US stock market “Flash Crash” in which it lost and recovered ~9% of value in minutes • Algorithmic solutions have been given great power when their wider effects are poorly understood

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Giving Data A Human Context • Make data available to people in a way that it has meaning to them • Engage and empower people to tell their own stories with their data • Give people access to their data and allow them to appreciate its value • Visualise data and co-opt human creativity to find solutions to difficult problems

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Why Data Visualisation? • It utilises human perceptual skills for sense-making • It aims to provide insight into complex information • It can be used to tell stories e.g. Guardian, N.Y. Times • It can be used to promote collaborative analysis e.g. ManyEyes, Tableau Public, Google Fusion Tables • Visualisation is a way to share perspectives and help people to understand their current behaviour

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Data Visualization: Example The Guardian’s interactive spending review app

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Data Visualization: Example The combination of interactive application and comment space encourages users to find and share insights

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Creativity • What is creativity? Novel + Appropriate • How are we creative? Use structured techniques in cycles of divergent and convergent thinking • Some examples of creativity techniques • Constraint removal • Creativity triggers • Analogous thinking

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Creativity Workshops in Action

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Research Case Study • E.ON Energy funded study of customer engagement with Smart Home technology • Drawing participants from 75 existing E.ON customers taking part in Smart Home trial in Milton Keynes • Participatory design workshops combining structured creativity techniques with exploration of interactive data visualizations • Aim to design prototype products or services that exploit or interface with increased energy data in new ways

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity E.ON Design Workshops • Participatory design process includes representatives of different stakeholder groups • E.ON workshop format: • 1 day long • ~12 participants in 3 design teams • Themed design activities combining creativity techniques with data exploration • Generating ideas around “Inform”, “Prompt” and “Control”

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Research Hypothesis Visualising data about current behaviour can result in greater participant involvement and more creative outputs during participatory design workshops.

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Conclusions • It is easier to collect data than to use it effectively • Smart meters are an opportunity but their information needs to be made relevant to consumers • Visualisation can place energy data in a human context where it can be used as platform for creative exploration of possible new products and services

Centre for HCI Design Centre for Creativity Questions? Graham Dove Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice City University London Graham.Dove.1@city.ac.uk