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THE PROACTIVE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR PROJECT
The Proac project is a national Danish project funded by Realdania. The aim of the project is to develop and test different methods of visualising energy consumption for residents in social housings. The project started in 2013 and is expected to finish in 2015. The evaluation of the project is funded by the Danish Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Affairs.
The overall assumption (the change theory) in the Proac project is that the introduction of energy visualising technologies to residents in social housings will lead to reduced energy consumption. Underlying this assumption is the belief that using technology to make energy consumption visible for the residents will create more awareness, and more awareness will lead to reduced energy consumption.
Based on this change theory Proac has developed three different energy visualisation strategies that will be tested at three different social housing association sites:
- Visualisation of energy consumption through in-house displays and web interfaces.
- Visualisation of energy consumption through monthly reports, app, and web interfaces.
- Visualisation of energy consumption through SMS, app, and web interfaces.
Each test site has its own partner group consisting of technology providers and a housing association. The partners in these groups are mainly solution-oriented, their role in the project being to develop new technological solutions. A project manager coordinates the technology tests across the different partner groups.
Kick-off workshop
We (the Alexandra Institute) were not part of the initial project group but were invited to join Proac by the project manager because of our background as anthropologists working with user-driven innovation in the energy sector. The project manager wanted us to advocate for the ‘human perspective’, which he believed to be lacking in the project. Our role in the project therefore quite naturally became one of challenging the existing solution and technology-oriented focus, with a more explorative and contextualising focus on how and why change is created.
When introducing The Model of Change, we gave a narrative about changing energy consumption through the introduction of technology, visually supported and structured by The Model of Change in the form of a PowerPoint slide like figure 1, and drawing upon a practice-oriented understanding of energy consumption (Entwistle et al 2014). Following our presentation of the practice theory and The Model of Change we used the presented insights as a frame for concept development in the workshop. Participants were divided into groups and asked to brainstorm on concepts using printed material that focussed on the contextual aspects of energy consumption such as the social, material and technological infrastructure surrounding and affecting the users and their energy consumption. Our role in the workshop was to facilitate partners in their concept development and document the results. We challenged their assumptions by asking questions about the statements they put in the different boxes of the model, and brought contextual aspects into the groups not focusing on these by themselves. The model helped us structure the discussions and made it easier for us to get the participants to also include factors they would not usually take into consideration. Following the kick off workshop the three groups developed and implemented the three solutions listed on page 4 at the three different test sites.
Change Theory Workshops
After the implementation of the three solutions we organised workshops with each partner group to facilitate an exploration and verbalisation of their assumptions about how to change energy consumption through the introduction of their specific (technological) solutions. We wanted to build something similar to what Dinesen and de Wit call a Program Theory (Dinesen and de Wit 2013: 66) with assumptions and hypotheses that we could use as a reference point for our findings in the field when we perform the evaluation. Before each workshop we analysed all the available case material and systematically wrote down the assumptions in it, using the Model of Change. The following is an example of our preparatory work with one of the concepts:
FIGURE 2. The Model of Change, filled out with assumptions from written case material
During the following workshops we encouraged the partners to fill out The Model of Change with their assumptions about the solutions that they had implemented at their test site. We wanted them to consider each category in the model as well as the correlations between categories. They started with the three ‘factual’ ones: Resources, Intervention and Result and then went on to the four remaining ‘contextual’ ones.
To avoid the same reductionist change theories as the one in Figure 2, we challenged the partners with our contextual and theoretical insights on the subject. The structure of the model made it easier for us to make the discussions concrete and enabled us to build chains of assumptions about what would work for whom under which circumstances (Dinesen and de Wit 2013). Figure 3 shows an example of such assumptions from a partner workshop. In the example we focus on the Perception and Experience and Interaction categories:
FIGURE 3. Results from change theory workshop
This hands-on experience of going through the concepts step by step to build these chains of assumptions forces the project partners to be concrete in their statements and to consider all aspects of the solution.
Having given this brief overview of how and with whom we do what using the Model of Change in the specific context of Proac, we will now reflect further upon the potentials and implications of using the model to rethink evaluation, generate new insights, develop new solutions and create a shared analytical framework.
RETHINKING EVALUATION WITH THE MODEL OF CHANGE
The initial assumptions about change in Proac were highly dominated by a rational-economical change theory in which people always choose to rationally and economically optimise their situation. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 2, there seems to be no reflections on what these solutions actually expect residents to do in practice with the technologies or the information they receive. These types of change theories leave very little room for understanding energy consumption as a mediated consumption, a consequence of everyday practices, formed by many different factors that lie both within and beyond the individual in his or her societal and material context (Entwistle et al. 2014).
To us as anthropologists, the idea that people will automatically change behaviour if they receive the right information is unsettling for a number of reasons. It implies a view of human behaviour as rational and intentional that seems incompatible with the anthropological understanding of behaviour as contextual, shaped by our concrete (sensory) engagements in the world (Ingold 2000, Howes 2004, Pink 2012). Understanding behaviour and practices in relation to energy consumption and how this becomes meaningful to people in their daily lives is no simple matter. Energy consumption and the different types of behaviour or practices associated with it is a complex phenomenon. Rooted in a practice theoretical approach (Bourdieu 1977, Reckwitz, A. 2002, Warde 2005) we understand energy consumption as a mediated hidden consumption affected by a set of interrelated factors that constitute meaningful practices in people’s daily lives (Gram-Hansen 2009, Shove 2010, Strengers 2011). Designing and evaluating interventions that aspire to change peoples behaviour or practices is therefore not simple either. We need to take contextual factors into account and this is what we make visible through The Model of Change.
At the Proac kick-off workshop we challenged the Logical Evaluation approach by making it visible to the partners that the categories in their logical evaluation approach leave them with no understanding of how or why change occurs. It only focuses on the causal relationship between Resource, Change Effort and Outcome (Dinesen & de Wit 2013).
We took the partners through the neglected categories one by one, illustrating each category’s importance in understanding change using empirical cases from the energy domain. The technologies implemented are situated in the context of everyday practices among a group of social housing residents that are generally characterised as being less resourceful than the average population, many of them live in buildings that are old and considered insufficient by the residents. Based on The Model of Change we showed how a deep understanding of these contextual factors is vital for qualifying the solutions implemented.