The Practice of Energy Consumption: A Techno-Anthropological Study of Practicing Energy Consumption Activities and Understanding Energy Consumption Feedback Visualizations

Munk, Rikke Plovmand

4. term

Techno-Anthropology, Master

2023

2023-06-01

78 pages

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how energy consumption feedback can be visualized in the most understandable way, and how people’s everyday practices influence their relation to energy consumption. An Aalborg-based company, Neogrid Technologies, is used as a case when investigating how energy consumption can be visualized. To obtain insights into how energy consumption feedback visualizations are understood, and also how people’s everyday practices are influencing their practices of energy consumption, interviews are performed with users of Neogrid’s smart heat management solution PreHEAT. All the empirical data is qualitatively gathered through 11 semi-structured interviews. The theoretical approach in the master’s thesis is Kirsten Gram-Hanssen’s perspective on practice theory, and the qualitative empirical data is analyzed with inspiration from Jennifer Attride-Stirling’s thematic analysis approach using thematic networks. The findings are presented as the three Global Themes: 1) Reasons for monitoring energy consumption, 2) Energy consumption practices and 3) The app and its visualizations. The master’s thesis concludes that people’s understanding of visualized energy consumption data differs with the majority liking numeric and analogue displays showing both numbers and graphs. Furthermore, it is found that the most important practice of people’s indoor climate is having a comfortable home, which sometimes conflicts with the act of reducing energy consumption.

Energy Consumption ; Energy Consumption Feedback ; Visualization ; Practice Theory ; Kirsten Gram-Hanssen ; Thematic analysis ; Thematic network ; Qualitative interviews ; Neogrid Technologies

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