Towards Highly Affine Visualizations of Consumption Data from Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach AffinityViz to visualize live and aggregated consumption data from multistory buildings. The objective of the approach is to provide a generic but high affinity relation between real buildings’ spatial layouts and the consumption data visualizations. Current approaches come short on maintaining such affinity. This implies an avoidable cognitive load on users such as energy managers and facility managers who need to monitor consumption and make decisions from consumption data. To alleviate this we have transformed three conventional types of visualizations into highly affine visualizations lowering the cognitive load for users. The contributions are: 1) Development of the AffinityViz techniques featuring three generic designs of highly affine visualizations of consumption data. 2) Comparison of the affine visualizations with the conventional visualizations. 3) Initial evaluation of the AffinityViz designs by expert users on real world data. Finally, the design challenges of AffinityViz are discussed, including prospects for AffinityViz as a future tool for visual analysis of data from buildings.