ENERGY AWARENESS IN THE OFFICE AND RESIDENTIAL BUILT ENVIRONMENTS: THE ECOFFICES AND ECOFAMILIES EXPERIMENTS

The “Energy-efficient Smart Building” is first a Building where the energy consumption is measured (with sensors) and controlled (with monitoring systems), allowing to optimise energy demand thanks to information streams, but also a Building able to manage understanding of the users regarding their habits and living styles, adapting to their practices, and providing easily available, comprehensible and useful information for further operations through various interfaces and taking advantage of new technologies like gaming and mixed reality. This paper introduces to two projects, one completed, one ongoing: the ECOFFICES - Energy Challenge within Offices - project [1] proposed a challenge for saving energy in office buildings in the form of a game, with an energy competition between employees taking place in an office building, and combined advanced energy metering, energy awareness and benchmarking to create an incentive scheme for energy savings. The ongoing ECOFAMILIES project [2] is investigating the “energy awareness” topic in the residential sector: following a user-centered approach, participatory workshops with families are organised with the ambition to co-design user interfaces for energy tracking and efficiency improvement at home. Issues such as type of information to be displayed, usage scenarios, type of physical device, shape and interaction to be implemented, are discussed together with the project team composed by designers, sociologists, construction, energy and IT experts.