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.