Exploring Reactions to Widespread Energy Monitoring

This paper explores the measurement, apportionment and representation of widespread energy monitoring. We explicate the accountability to users of the data collected by this type of monitoring when it is presented to them as a single daylong picture. We developed a technology probe that combines energy measurement from the home, workplace and the journeys that connect these spaces. Through deployment of this probe with five users for one month we find that measurement need not be seamless for it to be accountable; that apportionment is key to making consumption for communal spaces accountable and that people can readily make useful inferences about their energy consumption from daylong pictures formed from widespread monitoring. Finally, we present four issues raised by the probe – the nature of real world monitoring, the dynamic and social nature of apportionment, disclosure of energy data and alignment of incentives with consumption – that need to be addressed in future research.