How To Save The Planet Through Better User Interface Design

A wind turbine in rural Yorkshire, United Kingdom.

Today's IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5 °C marks the most explicit warning yet issued by an intergovernmental body about the threat of climate change to the lives of humans. At the core, the Panel's report concludes that if the average global temperatures increase to higher than 1.5°C, the destructive impact on human and natural systems will be significantly improved.

The IPCC work, however, points to a more profound challenge of how to be able to change large volumes of small behaviors and habits amongst substantial populations of people. This is potentially exacerbated by the low margins of change overall that the Panel has identified; at a human level the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C is barely perceptible, at a global scale it could be catastrophic.

"It's a really interesting problem that we've been learning about over the past few years," says Stephen Galsworthy, Head of Data Science at Quby, a connected devices company based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Early adopters of their products, which are white labeled by energy supply companies in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain, usually were looking for ways to be able to control their heating systems remotely rather than being concerned about their electricity and gas consumption.

"Energy consumption is a low- or no-interest topic for many homeowners. A lot of homeowners sometimes consider their electricity and gas bills a little bit like paying their mortgage - a cost that you need to spend to live, and not necessarily a variable cost." said the data scientist who was in London to present at the DataBricks Spark+AI Summit. Providing such consumers with their consumption on a per-hour basis does little to change how they act, as at any time it will be measured in little more than a few pennies or cents.

In the future, there are aspirations for how connected devices in the home will use the processing of data to be able to better optimize energy use automatically. But today the ability to greatly reduce energy use is a little more prosaic. "If you are looking in terms of pure energy saving, a really big thing is just being able to control gas consumption. Typically in European households, 80% of all energy is used to heat water and the home. Giving people the ability to control their heating simply and easily from their mobile phone gives a lot of opportunity for change."

Implicitly, Galsworthy raises an interesting question - how much of the answer to improving our environmental impact lies not in advanced technological wizardry, but by making more straightforward improvements to user interface design? "There are a lot of people who just keep the thermostat up high all day, and don't realize the consequences of that."

Many believe that the future for energy production and consumption will be decentralized. Micro-generation from renewable sources much closer to the point of use, combined with much more efficient homes and appliances will couple with smart technologies so that control increasingly rests in systems. However, for the short term merely making our existing systems more user-friendly could see some of the reductions in consumption that the IPCC are calling for in their report.

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