Chasing the Negawatt: Visualization for Sustainable Living

Information visualization has an important role in enabling residents to understand and manage their use of resources in the home. Existing solutions designed for building managers in industrial and commercial contexts don't account for the diverse factors at play in effective visualization of residential energy consumption. Such factors include placement, visibility, aesthetics, and integration with an information and visualization ecosystem. To provide a viable solution for homes, researchers developed the Adaptive Living Interface System (ALIS). ALIS is the interactive computing and information visualization backbone of North House, a net-zero home that placed fourth in the 2009 Solar Decathlon. This combination of green building methods with pervasive visualization technologies could be a powerful vehicle for encouraging conservation in a residential setting. However, simply transferring current approaches into the residential environment is inappropriate. Also, evaluation of these techniques involves myriad challenges. © 2010 IEEE.