Forms of Feedback: Lessons in
Living
Theme:
Current
Research
Contact:
Katy
Janda
Environmental
Studies Program
Oberlin
College
Oberlin,
OH 44074
440-775-8783
Despite our numerous interactions with the built environment, few members of the general public understand how buildings actually work, let alone their full effects on our health, psyche, and environment. Although there may not be much conscious understanding of these issues, we do learn from our surroundings. David Orr, for instance, uses the phrase Òarchitecture as pedagogyÓ to describe the belief that we learn from buildings, not just in them. Many of todayÕs educational buildings, Orr argues, teach students that locality is unimportant, energy can be squandered, and disconnectedness is normal.[1] Yet these lessons are usually tacit rather than explicit, and few people other than architects are ever taught to read the language of the built environment. As a result, the general population tends to treat buildings as static objects to rather than dynamic systems. Developing a higher level of building literacy reifies the lessons absorbed from existing buildings and, concurrently, provides a basis for understanding the need for change.
Many current green building efforts concentrate on only part of the necessary change. The U.S. Green Building CouncilÕs Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, for instance, targets physical and technical aspects of buildings as the primary focus of sustainability efforts. As a result, the material benefits of low VOC paints, passive solar design, and reclaimed lumber are the subject of much study, whilst the occupants of green buildings are generally not asked to contribute to the endeavor (except to be more productive). In this paper, I argue that implementing social and behavioral techniques to affect resource consumption patterns is an essential aspect of fostering responsible resource use. These techniques can be particularly powerful in the residential sector, where LEED has yet to tread.
The author is working with developers of a mixed-use, multi-income housing project[2] to incorporate behavioral conservation as well as technical efficiencies into the project. . The primary initial technique for encouraging conservation will be through different forms of feedback via decentralized meters for energy and water consumption. The feedback forms will include real-time modular meters (e.g., a Kill-A-Watt) that may be moved between individual plug loads and web-accessible monitored data for comparisons at the apartment and building scales. Although we will be unable to report on the quantitative or qualitative impacts of the feedback system itself until the housing units are built and occupied for some time, results of pilot tests using simple wall-mounted LED electricity meters are discussed. We also briefly review the feedback literature, describe the attributes of available metering technologies, and explore opportunities for further research into the dynamics of consumption.