Designing for Interaction and Insight: Experimental Techniques for Visualizing Building Energy Consumption Data

While more efficient use of energy is increasingly vital to the development of the modern industrialized world, emerging visualization tools and approaches of telling data stories provide an opportunity for the exploration of a wide range of topics related to energy consumption and conservation (Olsen, 2017). Telling energy stories using data visualization has generated great interest among journalists, designers and scientific researchers; over time it has been proven to be effective to provide knowledge and insights (Holmes, 2007). This thesis proposes a new angle of tackling the challenge of designing visualization experience for building energy data, which aims to invite the users to think besides the established data narratives, augment the knowledge and insight of energy-related issues, and potentially trigger ecological responsible behaviors, by investigating and evaluating the efficacy of the existing interactive energy data visualization projects, and experimenting with user-centric interactive interface and unusual visual expressions though the development of a data visualization prototype.