A Visualization System to Raise Awareness of Electricity Conservation in a University Building

Most educational institutes have initiated various efforts to reduce energy consumption. In the case of big universities, the reduction of energy consumption is especially difficult because of the complexity of university systems. To tackle this problem, we constructed a visualization platform encouraging people to reduce electricity consumption. We implemented a website called the "energy consumption visualization portal site" as a pull-based visual presentation and developed a desktop gadget and a digital signage system as push-based visual presentations. This article describes the implementation and evaluation of the pull- and push-based visual presentations. In the evaluation, we focused on increasing the user's motivation. We distributed questionnaires to survey the relationships between the user's motivation and the presentations used. One of the results we obtained is that push-based methods were effective to increase the user's motivation to save electricity, and digital signage was the best of the tested methods.