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Engineering vs. Ambient type visualizations: Quantifying effects of different data visualizations on energy consumption

Engaging consumers with energy use is a challenging endeavor; however, different forms of data visualization may help by creating relationships between a user and their data. Here we propose and conduct an experiment to test two different visualizations: an "engineering-type" visualization of a bar chart, and an "ambient-type" visualization of a cartoon tree. Participants in a competitive energy-saving game within an office building in Singapore received weekly emails visualizing their energy consumption and encouraging them to interact with their online game profile, and energy use was measured in addition to qualitative feedback through pre-experiment and post-experiment surveys. We find that the engineering-type visual did not result in statistically significant reductions whereas the ambient-type did, resulting in an average decrease of 82 Wh per day for the three days following treatment. Additionally, we find that greater engagement uniformly correlates positively with energy savings. A finite state machine simulation indicates that were this experiment scaled to 1000 people over 100 days, the total energy savings might be expected to be 1.1MWh.