In efforts to combat climate change, reduce an organisation’s carbon
footprint, and ultimately save resources, energy management
has become an important aspect of non-domestic building management.
The practice of energy managers can involve analysing
vast quantities of energy-related data, mostly quantitative, to assess
current demand and forecast future consumption of often complex
sets of buildings to identify targets for efficiency measures. In recent
years, we have worked closely with energy managers to create
better tools for them to not just uncover energy savings potential,
but find better ways of representing and understanding this data.
In doing so, we have faced several unexpected challenges, holding
back the creation of prototypes, with problems unique to this
specific application domain. We reflect on why this has proven so
difficult and point out the challenges of the prototyping process for
energy management.We use key HCI methodology to explain what
we believe the reasons for these challenges are, and discuss potential
ways to overcome them, offering recommendations for future
researchers to more effectively engage with energy management.