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Understanding conflict between landlords and tenants: implications for energy sensing and feedback

Published: 26 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Energy use in the home is a topic of increasing interest and concern, and one on which technology can have a significant impact. However, existing work typically focuses on moderately affluent homeowners who have relative autonomy with respect to their home, or does not address socio-economic status, class, and other related issues. For the 30% of the U.S. population who rent their homes, many key decisions regarding energy use must be negotiated with a landlord. Because energy use impacts the bottom line of both landlords and tenants, this can be a source of conflict in the landlord/tenant relationship. Ubicomp technologies for reducing energy use in rental units must engage with landlord/tenant conflicts to be successful. Unfortunately, little detailed knowledge is available about the impact of landlord/tenant conflicts on energy use. We present an analysis of a series of qualitative studies with landlords and tenants. We argue that a consideration of multiple stakeholders, and the power imbalances among them, will drive important new research questions and lead to more widely applicable solutions. The main contribution of our work is a set of open research questions and design recommendations for technologies that may affect and be affected by the conflict between stakeholders around energy use.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '10: Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing
    September 2010
    366 pages
    ISBN:9781605588438
    DOI:10.1145/1864349
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. domestic computing
    2. energy
    3. inequality
    4. sustainability

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    Ubicomp '10: The 2010 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
    September 26 - 29, 2010
    Copenhagen, Denmark

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    UbiComp '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 202 submissions, 19%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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