DESIGN OF INTERFACES TO METERING IN THE HOME

Is it important that home metering devices comply with basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness? Usually designers focus on cognition, technical feasibility and style, and design of interfaces typically comes rather late in the process. But if metering is to benefit energy conservation and a more frugal lifestyle in general, cognitive and ecological approaches alone, may - despite their obvious importance - not do the trick.

Currently I am reading up on Deci & Ryan's so-called 'organismic' approach, which is about humans' need to feel autonomy as well as community. The empirical material Anne Marie Kanstrup and I have collected on user reactions to electricity metering in the home holds so many puzzling details, that it deserves more analysis, and a stronger theoretical underpinning of the analytical model.

Ideas relating to smart metering and smart grid technology are flowing abundantly at the moment, but little attention is given to socio-psychological and cultural-historical aspects: Humans have metered nature and resources like forever, and apart from the obvious reason of trying to predict and preserve living conditions, it is likely that this activity contributes to human development of both autonomy and community. Just as Gibson's concept of affordances offer designers conceptual guidance regarding how artifact can become a tool in the hands of humans, a better conceptualization of the role of the experience of household metering may improve chances that these systems can serve as regulating 'traffic lights.'

WITTGENSTEIN

YouTube provides us with a quick version of what Wittgenstein is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0cN_bpLrxk and the following. Ben Mathews has provided me with a deeper entry, for which I am most grateful: Norman Malcolm's Wittgenstein-book: 'A religious point of view' with a response by Peter Winch, Cornell University Press, 1995. Pelle Ehn, Ingela Josefson, Bo Göranzon and Hans Siggaard Jensen all introduced Wittgenstein to me in the early 1980ies - and I stayed faithfull to the little I understood, I should say. But Malcolm's book makes an important point, which I did not get back then: The limitations of analytical thought, and it is just SO important these days, where all design knowledge and all design competence is seeked codified - there are at the moment more than a million entries on 'design thinking' - give that a thought!