Office of Research See Energy - Office of Research

See Energy

See Energy

The Challenge

As the world-wide population grows, there is an increasing need to develop methods to reduce energy consumption and emissions by providing better user interfaces, feedback, and visualization to consumers.

See Energy

Why It Is Important

Current vehicles, buildings and appliances are not user-friendly in relaying useable data to consumers. Improvements in understanding energy use through visualization of various data will lead to decreased energy use of each consumer, and this combined decrease will have a major overall impact.

Our Approach

The Consumer Energy Interface (cEnergi) interdisciplinary team is investigating how one would fundamentally transform the way energy is experienced and perceived by consumers. The target is to alter individual and social behaviors and lifestyles in ways that significantly educate consumers to understand and reduce their energy use and emissions. This involves creating innovative user feedback tools in combination with ubiquitous computing and social models based in grounded behavioral science and linked to new energy‐saving technologies that will initiate behavioral and cultural change.

With a team of internationally recognized experts in consumer behavior and energy use from the behavioral sciences, design, computer science, and engineering fields, we harness the potentially transformative effect of user‐generated energy content distributed to and among energy users—through ubiquitous computing and feedback systems, tangible user interfaces, and innovative social connections. The team includes a number of undergraduate students from different departments, graduate students designing dissertation experiments, and post‐docs and faculty guiding radical new interdisciplinary research. The teams’ knowledge base not only includes a wide breadth of disciplines from interactive visualization and behavior research, but also specialized insights from industry (like Hannah Park, a vehicle energy feedback researcher from Hyundai joining cEnergi as a new MFA design student).

Impacts & Highlights

  • SESEME (Social Energy Sensing Monument) was installed at the ARC for the summer (May-September) where students, staff and visitors were able to experience it and learn about energy issues on campus.
  • GreenFly and Conscious Cook are both live. GreenFly is especially promising in terms of the carbon savings that could result from widespread adoption.
  • A typology of in-vehicle eco-driving feedback interfaces in the Proceedings of Association of Human Factors and Ergonomics Convention was published as part of the eco-driving feedback research program.
  • Dr. Sanguinetti began a project with the Center for Water-Energy Efficiency on a project funded by the Department of Water Resources. The project is in collaboration with WaterSmart, a software company that develops home water reports (an eco-feedback intervention promoting water conservation).

Team Faculty

Thomas Turrentine Research Anthropologist of The Institute of Transportation Studies
Nina Amenta Professor and Chair of Computer Science
Glenda Drew Associate Professor of Design
Ken Kurani Associate Researcher of The Institute of Transportation Studies
Kwan-Liu Ma Professor of Computer Science and of the Institute for Data Analysis & Visualization
Alan Meier Faculty Researcher of the Energy Efficiency Center and of the Institute of Transportation Studies
Dan Sperling Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Environmental Science & Policy
Dahlia Garas Program Manager for The Institute of Transportation Studies
Matthew Favetti Programmer for the Institute of Transportation Studies
Angela Sanguinetti Postdoc Employee for The Institute of Transportation Studies
Robbie McMurry Programmer at the Western Cooling Efficiency Center
Kelsea Dombrovoski Graduate Student of Community Development
Gabriel Castillo Cortes Graduate Student of Computer Science
Suhaila Sikand Undergraduate Student of Design
Tim Stapleton Undergraduate Student of Behavioral Design
Vishal Chakraborty Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Yitong Li Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Andrew Kwon Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Thomas Bui Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Corey Ching Undergraduate Student of Computer Science
Andrew Ferguson Undergraduate Student of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Belinda Huang Undergraduate Student of Design
Thea French Undergraduate Student of Sustainable Design
Bradley Singer Undergraduate Student of Computer Science & Engineering
Kyle Calica Undergraduate Student of Computer Science & Engineering
Tuan Vu Undergraduate Student of Computer Science & Engineering
Anmol Singh Undergraduate Student of Computer Science & Engineering

For more information on this program, please contact Christine Parks [email protected].