hello my name is Steve this is Awais and we' are from the University of Queensland in Australia
and we're presenting our paper titled Neighborhood Wattch using Speculative
Design to Explore Values around Curtailment and Consent in Household Energy Interactions in 2012
a story went viral where U.S retailer Target was found to be accurately predicting early
stage pregnancy based on loyalty card's purchase history in 2021 energy use data is becoming the
next frontier for user profiling and targeted marketing as household solar battery storage
and energy monitoring devices continue to proliferate within our built environments
energy usage data becomes increasingly available and valuable to advertisers and corporations
yet Australians typically receive their electricity bills only once per quarter
energy is a low involvement product and many users may be poorly equipped to understand the
substantial potential consequences of the inference possible through energy use data
to address this problem we used speculative design to
elicit user values on two fundamental concerns of today's energy landscape
charting awareness and attitudes towards matters of privacy and consent with high frequency energy
use data and motivating participation in energy network concerns such as voluntary curtailment
we conducted semi-structured qualitative in-home interviews with participants from 39 Australian
households interviews lasted between 50 to 80 minutes participants showed us the types of
appliances in their house to help us understand habits and what appliances we used and when
in these interviews we also presented households with a speculative app
called Neighborhood Wattch Neighborhood Wattch lets users check the health of their local energy
network by viewing the capacity of electrical transformers on a street or suburb level the
app also features a search by street functionality to view the current capacity of any given stream
by clicking on a house on any street one can view the real-time energy you started from that house
including the appliances in use at the time a key motivation when designing neighbourhood watch
was to clearly articulate the participants the inference that's possible into daily activities
through computational analysis of high frequency energy data forcing them to carefully consider
their values around this information and with who they might share it after stepping through
the app participants were asked their thoughts on the app the privacy of the information and
under what circumstances and with whom would they share this type of information through a thematic
analysis concerns were grouped into physical security curtailment and intra-family concerns
our paper unpacks the findings in more detail than we can here but we draw attention to two
specific points first surveillance participants valued their relationships with their neighbors
and disliked the way in which Neighborhood Wattch threatened to disrupt these relationships through
the attribution of individual accountability for energy consumption the value of being
able to exist unsurveilled was paramount where participants did not want to be monitored in their
own home or nor be voyeurs of others second intra family concerns certain participants reasoned how
sharing high granularity energy used data implicates others in the household and how
willingness to share data might not be uniform across a household one part has been while
talking about data said it's about your house and everyone in it whereas if i get on Facebook or if
i'm on Google let's shift me this quote highlights how energy used data is interpersonal data and how
gathering consent for use of energy data from a single point of contact might be problematic
Neighborhood Wattch laid bare the implications of a world in which high granularity energy use
data is becoming more ubiquitous sensitive and valuable our findings demonstrate that many users
seem unprepared ill-equipped unaware or even unconcerned by a future in which the intimate
details of their family's lives can be made visible to third parties through the transfer
of their energy data a concern for design is to ensure that the growing availability
and analysis of energy data does not lead to new forms of observation and control
we found energy use feedback software visualizations etc was often the exclusive
domain of one typically male household member this means it's possible for a family member to
remotely monitor their spouse or child's activity when they may not be aware and then smart home
technology further allows them to remotely control appliances that they might be using
empowering users with respect to future energy systems
involves considering how consent may be gained from all users implicated in a house's data
moving forward we envisage a design agenda which first acquaints users with inference
possible through energy data capture before designing to empower users to realize the many
benefits of this data and there are many benefits in a way that does not subject them
to corporate surveillance or new mechanisms for control thank you very much let's talk offline