BECC 2011 Conference Reflections
Last week, I attended the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) Conference in Washington, DC. Since I am just starting my degree, I didn’t have anything to present. However, I wanted to attend to get a sense of what sort of work is being done in the energy and behavior space. Overall, it was an interesting conference and definitely got me thinking about a couple things.
Here’s my play-by-play:
Session 1: “Feedback and Behavior: Getting into their Heads, Homes and Habits”. This panel of people from energy efficiency companies was a really interesting overview of how people are trying to encourage energy efficiency via very different business models. EnergyHub focuses on developing “smart” tools such as in-home displays, sockets, and thermostats that interface with a website. They focus on giving people immediate feedback – for example, giving you advice on where to set your thermostat while you are setting it.
I was less impressed by Efficiency 2.0 which called itself the “Groupon of Energy Efficiency” and uses a reward-based system to encourage energy efficiency. Maybe it’s true that “90% of people don’t care about energy” but I still think it’s important for them to understand the problem and it shouldn’t be necessary to trick people into energy efficiency.
The final company in the panel was Opower, whom I have looked at before as a result of my interest in electricity bills. They use social norms to encourage energy efficiency by telling people how much energy they use compared to their neighbors. They are currently focused on making these message more personal by providing a clearer context of who your neighbors are. Right now they use a bar graph display, but they showed a geographical display that they are also planning to implement for comparisons between neighborhoods.
Interestingly, all three of these companies emphasize monetary savings over environmental messaging.
Session 2: “Which Technique is Most Effective?”. When comparing techniques for encouraging energy efficiency including:
- information/energy-saving tips
- ranking/competition
- social norms/neighbor comparison
- goal-setting
goal-setting was the clear winner with approximately 1.33-2.13% reduction in energy usage. However, it’s very important to make sure individuals choose ambitious yet achievable goals for the program to work. The close second was social norms with 0.87-1.39% reduction in energy usage. This might seem small, but it really does make a difference.
There was also an interesting talk about moral licensing where a study by Verena Tiefenbeck showed that people who got messages about water conservation increased their energy conservation. I was certainly surprised by that finding!
Session 3: “Worldviews, Lifestyles, Attitudes and Pocketbooks”. This session was a little hit-or-miss. It brought up some important points, such as the role of local weather in determining opinions about climate change. I was really surprised when I first learned about that phenomenon. To think, a warm cup of coffee in your hands could really cause you to perceive the people around you as warmer! But there were also some low points, such as when one of the speakers talked about the effect of gender on energy efficiency messages in an evolutionary psychology framework. *gag*
Also, apparently Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard is a good book.
Session 4: “The Importance of Messaging: Getting the Word Out in Good, Bad and Political Times”. The first talk was about how they encouraged conservation in Japan when all the nuclear generation was taken offline. Some people in Japan reduced their electricity consumption by 25%! I learned that the word for energy efficiency in Japanese is “setsuden“. The take-home message for effective messaging was that they did not have effective messaging. In fact, their messaging was very confusing in that it was unclear how much energy people should save and how. But, since the country was in the midst of a crisis, everyone understood that they should probably do something. Alan Meier has written a bunch about this phenomenon.
SCE took an edutainment approach with Carl & Eddy in an effort to portray the utility as an energy adviser and improve customer satisfaction.
Session 5: “The Frontiers of Behavior Research”. This was my favorite session. ACEEE talked about their plans for “tamagotchi buildings” where buildings are personified (sort of like pets or … tamagotchis?) via a full sensory experience. For example, the elevator groans if you use it to go only one floor or something makes you think “oh no the building is sad” and causes you to engage in some energy-efficient behavior.
CoolCalifornia.org talked about a competition they are planning to launch in California. I spent most of this presentation being shocked that the carbon footprint of snack food is equal to that of meat. How has no one ever told me that before?
Session 6: “Sensing Peoples’ Behavior: Innovative Techniques to Find Out What’s Really Happening”. This session was a really interesting panel of techniques that ranged from the SenseCam that was filled with sensors plus took pictures every minute and when an event occurred (ex. sudden change in temperature) to disaggregation of smart meter data via algorithms.
Session 7: “Targeting Low Income Communities”. The first talk did a segmentation analysis to make profiles of different high-energy usage, low-income consumers. They identified 5 profiles:
- Declining Health/Wealth (27%) – retired, stay at home most of the time
- Divided Household (26%) – large families, renters with extra appliances
- Hostage to Domicile (24%) – inefficient housing
- Concerned but Uninformed (19%) – unaware how to reduce usage
- Merry Users (13%) – at the top of the low-income bracket, “I can afford to have all of these appliances, so why shouldn’t I?”
The other talks discussed how economic factors can do little to incur behavior change when the consumers are unaware that their bills could be lower or how to accomplish this. Community-based efforts can be particularly effective for closing this knowledge gap.
Overall it was a good conference and I definitely want to go back and present next year. I discussed my research plans with a couple people and they seemed interested. Most of the sessions I went to focused on messaging and how to communicate to consumers – I was surprised by how much interest there was in this subject. It seems like this is the sort of thing that they would have already figured out, but I guess the electricity industry is even further behind the times than I realized in terms of customer engagement.
Who’s Responsible for Reducing Global Energy Use?
In thinking about the context of energy conservation, there’s an interesting clash between developed and developing countries regarding energy consumption.
Historically, developed countries cashed in on all of the benefits of industrialization and opened up the world to numerous environmental woes (i.e. climate change, ozone depletion, global warming etc.). Now, environmentalists from those nations are trying to make things right and recognize that this may need to involve some lifestyle changes*. Enter “Drying for Freedom” who are fighting for our right to … use clotheslines. This is a hugely contentious issue in a society where clotheslines=poverty=low status. As Sociological Images explained, many of the rules of homeowners associations have everything to do with showing how high class the neighborhood is rather than encouraging any kind of environmental action:
Homeowners associations require many things intended to increase the “curb appeal” and property value of homes. Many of these things specifically function to make the home and yard appear decorative instead of functional. Rules prohibit visible vegetable gardens, parking cars in the driveway overnight, allowing your cat outside (lest they poop), and failing to clean oil stains left by leaky vehicles. They turn driveways, curbs, front yards, and porches into communal space designed to advertise the luxury of having non-functional spaces. They say “this is a lovely neighborhood where we can afford to curate flowers instead of vegetables and preserve pristine concrete by taking our cars to Jiffy Lube.”
This is fascinating to me because it has a very specific cultural resonance in American society. We take it for granted that we have a high likelihood of being offered access to a dryer/other time-saving appliances. In the “Drying for Freedom” trailer, they even say:
We are exporting our bad habits. In places like India and Brazil a section of the population is becoming more wealthy and they are willing to imitate the American lifestyle – perhaps creating a huge problem for the future. The developing world can see that the most profligate countries (America, Europe) are doing something. The developing countries say “ok, we’re more likely to join in the fight”.
Really? They’re going to “join the fight”? This seems wildly optimistic to me in a world that is increasingly buying into the idea that high consumption=high status. I’m not convinced that developing nations even believe that climate change is their problem. I am reminded of my experiences in Kiritimati as a student in SEA Semester. I learned that Kiritimati may be submerged in as soon as 10 years as a result of projected sea-level rise. Their president is very concerned about this. As he explained to the press in 2008: “To plan for the day when you no longer have a country is indeed painful but I think we have to do that.” Yet, in talking to the people of Kiritimati, I learned that many thought their President was foolish. Their immediate concerns were limited food resources and access to water rather than whether they might become the first “environmental refugees”. Clearly, the people of Kiritimati have a different perspective than their President, who has flown all over the world raising awareness about climate change.
But there’s even more to this problem than whether or not developing nations will “do their part” to reduce the effects of climate change that the developed world set in motion. Energy consumption has huge implications on the lives of women around the world – because in most parts of the world, these energy-intensive appliances are time-saving devices for tasks relegated as “women’s work” (i.e. laundry, cooking, cleaning). In a TED Talk that I discovered via Sociological Images (love that blog), Hans Rosling explains that we (as people from developed nations) have no right to tell people in developing countries what to do as long as we are still consuming exorbitant amounts of electricity per person. Because technology like washing machines can open a whole new world for people in developing countries, just as it did for us:
And what’s the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the “ABC.” This is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.
*But do there have to be lifestyle changes? This point can be argued – but I fall in the “It really wouldn’t hurt to combine energy conservation and energy efficiency strategies to maximize our total energy savings” camp.
Usability for Energy Conservation & Efficiency
My engineering training heavily emphasized the importance of usability. So it’s no surprise that in my graduate work, it’s one of the first things that comes to my mind when I look at an interface.
As a result, my current research has emerged from an interest in improving the electricity bill interface for consumers. In fact, the ACEEE recently published a report on how little information is communicated in electricity bills. The main information that a bill is attempting to get across is how much you owe – and that’s also the only item listed on the first page of every electricity bill that the ACEEE studied. Are there really electricity bills where the only thing on the first page is the Amount Due? Yes, yes there are.
I’ve also been developing my own collection of electricity bills. Main realization – I don’t actually care about most of the information on the first page. Shockingly, I don’t really care that I paid a 0.06 tax. I am not dying to know when my next scheduled meter reading is. That doesn’t give me any information that I can use. It’s no surprise that bills are obviously designed for the utility (based on what the public utility commissions require them to disclose), not the consumer. According to the ACEEE report, less than 70% of bills include a graph of historical usage at all. Less than 50% put that graph on the first page. There is obviously a usability disconnect.
But this is only one example of a usability disconnect in the energy conservation space. Some people are looking to fix this. The inventor of the iPod just came out with a fancy programmable thermostat that “programs itself”. I wonder how many programmable thermostats are currently out in the world being misused because the user couldn’t figure out how to program it properly or didn’t have the time/energy to do it. My guess – a significant percentage.
Life Plan
I feel like I ought to have some sort of semblance of a life plan. Before I graduated from college, I was obsessive about having a plan, but I never really planned much farther than 5 years into the future. I needed to always be working towards something and making sure my whole life fit together. Then I graduated.
It was like a switch went off. All of a sudden I had MY WHOLE LIFE ahead of me. It was incredibly intimidating. I felt like I had spent my whole life working to get to this point … and then I got there. What was I supposed to do now?
I had decided to go the fun/interesting job route (see at sea) rather than a traditional engineering rotation program. I had mixed feelings about it. I loved the people I worked with, the crazy things that always happen at sea and the sense of independence and pride that comes with fixing things. But I also hated being gone all the time, feeling like I had no career mobility, and the the stress of trying to fix a complicated system that I didn’t completely understand with limited help.
So I applied to grad school. When I decided to apply to grad school, I was much unhappier in my job than I was by the time I actually left. So my older posts are a lot more bitter than I actually feel about the experience now.
But I still have the same old problem of feeling like I don’t know what I’m working towards. It’s easy to focus on the short term and just make getting my PhD my goal. But then I’ll end up in the same situation where I graduate and feel like I’m floundering.
So, my new plan is to keep a running list of people who have cool jobs that I might like to have. For example:
Paul C. Stern – he’s the president of the Social and Environmental Research Institute (a non-profit research institute).
Nancy Hersh – she’s the VP of Consumer Marketing and Analytics at Opower (fancy bill designing company).
Shui Bin – she’s a senior researcher at ACEEE (American Counsel for an Energy-Efficient Economy).
Wooooo. Awesome things.
Published!
So you’ve probably all forgotten this – but I actually started this blog for my Humanities Capstone Project so that I could graduate from engineering school. As part of that project, I wrote a book review version of my essay, “The Only Girl Here: Women and the Trades” and submitted it to the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
Guess what.
Microaggressions
I recently read Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation by Derald Wing Due. This is such a good framework for thinking about how tiny acts of racism/sexism/heterosexism that individually seem benign accumulate to add stress to the lives of minorities by emphasizing negative stereotypes and maintaining the invisibility of their lives and life experiences.
“The term was first coined by Pierce in 1970 in his work with Black Americans where he defined it as “ subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘ put – downs ’ ” (Pierce, Carew, Pierce – Gonzalez, & Willis, 1978, p. 66). They have also been described as “ subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously ” (Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000).”
There are so many ways that microaggressions effect the lives of minorities. Some are positive – minorities tend to be more acutely aware of their surroundings and better at nonverbal communication because they have spent their lives learning to “speak a language” that is not “natural” to them (if that metaphor makes sense).
“Women, for example, who work for a primarily male – dominated company often say they must understand the thinking and mind-set of their male colleagues in order to do well in the company (earn retention and promotion). They often complain that no such reciprocity exists with male colleagues; for them to do well, they need not understand the worldview of female coworkers!”
However, these tiny put-downs add a huge amount of unnecessary stress. When I hear blatant heterosexism, I often have a very physical reaction. I have to decide how to react to it, what to say, whether it’s worth it all in a matter of seconds. It’s awkward to confront people, but sometimes it’s even more uncomfortable to hold it all in.
“Blacks who witnessed the unfair decisions showed pronounced impairment of problem solving; but those who witnessed subtle racism showed more impairment than those confronting overt racist conditions. The investigators believe that Blacks have developed coping strategies to deal with overt racism, in which no “ guesswork ” is involved. But the constant, vague, just-below-the-surface acts of covert racism impair performance by draining psychological energy or detracting from the task at hand. Interestingly, the findings were reversed for the White volunteers; they were more impaired by overt rather than subtle racism.”
I think it’s important to also be aware of my own ability to commit microaggressions against other people. As is explained in the book, it’s easy to accidentally say things that seem benign but reveal underlying negative stereotypes that we have absorbed from the world around us. No one is immune. But we all have the choice to be conscious of what we say and how we act. As Albert Einstein said, “The world is too dangerous to live in — not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.”
I think it’s also interesting to think about how our society has manipulated the way we define things in order to match existing stereotypes. For example, men are “stronger” because of how we define what it means to be the “stronger” sex:
Indeed a case can be made that women are physically more resilient, are more resistant to illnesses, tolerate pain better, possess greater endurance except in short-term feats, and have a much longer life span than men. Yet, physical strength continues to play a large role in determining superiority and inferiority of the sexes.
There has been a lot of research on the gendering of science that shows how our stereotypes about men and women impact how we understand the world. For example, the classic example is how we describe the egg and the sperm.
UWaterloo Drama and Women’s Bodies
There is so much policing of women’s bodies. That’s why there is a need for events like Slutwalk to reject it. That’s why female engineers worry so much about what they wear. I mean seriously, even bodies that only imply femaleness need policing.
And I think that sucks.
I recently heard about the drama at University of Waterloo where a female engineering student posed in a bikini next to a Formula SAE car that she helped design and build. The school administration found the photos on the internet and suspended the entire Formula SAE team, preventing them from attending that year’s competition.
I have a lot of feelings about this.
First, I was involved in designing, building and racing a human-powered vehicle for an engineering design competition during my 4 years in school. I would have been absolutely devastated if anything prevented us from getting to competition. All the extra work, complicated logistics, late nights were worth it because competition was so much fun. We got to push ourselves as both athletes and engineers as hard as possible and we loved it. I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to have been denied that opportunity as an engineering design team member.
Second, I’m not sure how I feel about the photographer. After all the backlash, he is only concerned about getting credit. I assume he got permission to post the picture on the internet but still, I would feel bad about what ultimately came to pass. I feel like his response post is weird.
Mostly, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. I don’t really have anything to say about how they may or may not have broken rules etc. etc. What I think is most interesting is that the Dean claimed that the photo shoot was inappropriate and denigrating to women.
I’m not sure if I agree with that. Or rather, I’m torn. We live in a patriarchy. That is why the Miss Universe/UniGirl/Whatever Competition required a bikini shot in the first place. In the context of knowing who this woman is and why she is posing with this car, I think this photo shoot is awesome. Yeah! Be sexy and smart! But … it was probably a bad idea to put it on the internet (maybe I’m only saying that in retrospect?).
In any case, there is clearly a lot of policing of women’s bodies going on! We could sit around and argue that it would have been different if it was a male student. But that’s missing the dude-we-live-in-a-patriarchy point – do you really think it’s even likely that a male engineering student would even be in a sexy swimsuit photo shoot? I’m not implying that male engineers don’t have sexy bodies. I’m just saying that I don’t think there are many competitions that require men to produce sexy swimsuit shots. Feel free to counterpoint with examples.
I feel uncomfortable with the implication that her actions made all women engineers look bad and/or made University of Waterloo look less lady-friendly. I think that’s an exaggeration and puts too much pressure on individual women engineers to be perfect. “You better behave! You’re representing all of women in engineering!” Too many minorities feel this way and it creates unnecessary pressure (*cough* stereotype threat *cough*).
I feel icky about this whole thing.
Reading All the Slutwalk Blog Posts
I love thinking about feminism and intersectionality and racism. That’s why I think this quote is so interesting! It makes me think.
In my estimation we need some new paradigms for dealing with the racial politics of feminist organizing that go beyond piecemeal gestures of inclusivity, which almost always find white women trying to prove that their movements ARE universal, and asking Black women to show why they’re not. And as the commenter “withoutscene” indicates above, my invitation to locate the term “slut” within white female experience was an invitation to really begin thinking about the politics and realities of whiteness in a different way, not an invitation to obscure those politics. For instance, what would it mean to think about “slut(ti-ness)” as invention of white cultural sexual pathology? What would it mean to frame the movement in these terms? Because then, there are also clear grounds for women of color to be involved, in the sense that we, too, are victims (with white women) of white cultural sexual pathology? See that’s a radically different notion of sluttiness as being part of white (female) cultural experience that automatically creates space for racial solidarity without forcing women of color to argue that our experience is the same as white women’s. It also means though that the officers original statement which inspired SlutWalk Toronto would have been understood UP FRONT as both a raced and gendered statement, rather than a gendered statement, that has engendered activism that must now make sure to include race.
This is part of a series of posts I’m calling “From the Literature”, where I digest an academic article related to my future graduate school research.
THE ARTICLE
Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings
Attari, S. Z., DeKay, M. L., Davidson, C. I. and W. Bruine de Bruin. “Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings.” PNAS Early Edition, 2010 <www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1001509107>.
IN ONE TWEET
Maybe improved education can help people estimate energy usage more accurately? They under-estimate high-energy consumption/savings.
WHAT I LEARNED
Despite the fact that efficiency leads to a far greater reduction in energy usage than curtailment, the go-to method for reducing individual energy usage is still to turn off the lights when you leave a room. While this does save energy, it hardly makes up for the old, inefficient refrigerator sitting in your kitchen! See attached plots.
MY OPINION
I remember my sister (a college student) explaining that she and her roommates were very invested in reducing their energy usage to keep down their utility bills. However, one of her roommates was taking it a bit far. Eventually she had to draw the line – unplugging the wireless router every time they left the house was not worth it!
This is true.
