Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

“Will the Last One Out, Please Turn Off the Lights”: Promoting Energy Awareness in Public Areas of Office Buildings

In Proc. of the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI 2018). pages 20-36. 2018.

Joëlle Coutaz, Antonin Carlesso, Nicolas Bonnefond, Raffaella Balzarini, Yann Laurillau, Nadine Mandran, James Crowley

Abstract

Most previous research in sustainable HCI has focused on electricity consumption in domestic environments or private office spaces. Here, we ad-dress use of lighting in public areas of office buildings with the goal of under-standing and measuring how calm technologies can inspire positive engagement by promoting awareness and competition. We have conducted a 15-month study with the design, deployment, and assessment of two complementary ambient apparatus (one centralized, one distributed) in an office building occupied by ICT start-up companies. Our results show that calm technology can be effective under specific conditions, resulting in a significant reduction of average elec-tricity consumption. We also discovered that in the absence of automatic con-trols, approximately 25% of lighting consumption occurred during off-work hours.