Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics
Using student behavior data to improve performance in university buildings
The primary problem that CBPD and Azizan’s team were facing was the lack of engagement within the campus community (student, faculty and staff) to conserve energy at CMU. When Carnegie Mellon University started submetering on approximately 35+ campus buildings this past fall semester, the CBPD gathered a wealth of data since September on the energy consumption of CMU’s buildings, such as heating, cooling, pumps/fans, lighting, plugs, lab equipment and more. With this data, they have identified many ways that people’s behavior can improve the performance of such buildings without interrupting their activity inside the building. If these strategies can be properly implemented, thousands or even millions of dollars can be saved from the energy bill.
However, developing such strategies requires the cooperation and change of behavior among students, faculty and the rest of university community. Although Azizan’s team already has a properly built database, no external user has ever interacted with the data. Not to mention the number of already built complex applications that no one is using. Azizan’s team was not able to effectively communicate with the campus community and further to change people’s action of using the building. Few stakeholders realized the huge cost-saving opportunity lying in the campus building. Reducing energy waste is important to the whole university community. From the students’ dimension, better building performance means less energy cost, and therefore possibly lower tuition fees. From the university’s dimension, less energy cost means a better image for the university as a whole because energy efficiency is an important factor for determining a prestigious university in engineering fields.
Moreover, the university can gain substantial financial interest if the building energy waste can be reduced. The waste of energy costs the whole university thousands or even millions of dollars each year. If the money can be reinvested in more valuable area such as scholarships to attract talented students or fellowships to attract pioneer faculty, the whole campus community’s overall welfare would be substantially improved.
For the CBPD, this is a very important issue at heart. One of CBPD’s goal is to support sustainability and energy conservation. If we can help them successfully communicate with the university community to help reduce campus building energy consumption, it will be a prime example of the organization’s purpose and goal. With a successful case at CMU, the CBPD will be able to help other organizations to improve their building performance and make the whole community more sustainable. As students ourselves, Azizan believes our team has a better understanding of how we can engage our peers to conserve energy at CMU better than himself and his CBPD team and thinks we can take advantage of that to address this issue.
research & process
In order to find the most apt solution to our client’s problem in the initial phase of the project, team conducted a lot of field research for the first half of the semester. To start, we began to probe some of the initiatives that our client’s team or Carnegie Mellon University has conducted currently or in the past. Through a myriad of interviews, including Student Affairs, we found out that there were a number of programs and projects that were taking place in order to increase sustainable acts within the campus. One of the initiatives was the annual dorm competition, some of which were held across various campuses. The incentive was a pizza party and the honor of having the dorm as the winner. However we found out that only a handful of students had participated in or even knew about this on-going project. Another initiative was the ‘Scotty Goes Green’ project which engages the faculty and staff members of the university to see which department can utilize the least energy. However after investigating we found out that very few individuals participate or even know about these programs.
Upon finding out about the many programs that have failed to have adequate engagement or impact, our team decided to conduct surveys to both the students as well as faculty members to fully find out the root cause of this lack of engagement. We surveyed over 240+ students and 50+ staff/faculty to gauge the interest of the CMU body on issues related to campus energy consumption and future efforts to conserve energy on-campus. Through our survey, we found out that students were interested in the school’s effort to be sustainable and were willing to help with a better incentive. For instance, 71% of the participants thought that the campus can benefit a good amount from conserving energy and using the money saved towards other campus resources and 62% of participants thought that Carnegie Mellon University can likely or very likely reduce its utility bill with the conservation of energy. For the last question of the survey, we asked participants to write what they felt about the school and its effort to conserve energy. Below are some of the responses written.
“CMU currently makes no effort to inform students in real time in regards to not only their energy usage, but the school’s energy usage. Other schools have public boards where this information is made public. Other schools where environmental initiatives are at the forefront of student body discussion ensure these efforts are well publicized, but CMU clearly adheres to the stereotype that techies are indifferent individuals.”
“I always wondered why they ran the tennis court lights during the winter when the courts were covered with snow and had no nets.”
“CMU does not value energy conservation/efficiency. There has been a proposal for solar panels on the UC rooftop that has just been sitting there and administration has done nothing.”
As shown above, students are more interested in the university’s consumption of energy than we expected. The survey results shed light on the fact that there is no platform in which students can act upon some of their concerns for sustainability.
After conducting our survey, our client and our team came to a conclusion that it would be a good idea to create a platform through which students can vote on specific locations on campus to focus on energy conservation. One example would be the UC swimming pool where the lights can be turned off during the day because the large windows allow enough daylight to brighten the pool. Once they vote on an area, the money saved from the conservation would be given back to the students as a reward. To proceed with the idea, we then met up with the Facilities Management Services (FMS) to figure out some of the logistics of our project proposal and to share the information we had collected. However after meeting with FMS, we learned that the University was in fact implementing many initiatives to conserve energy and was doing relatively well compared to other similar schools. We also found out that there is a substantial disconnect between the student/faculty body and FMS, where information regarding campus energy usage or efforts to make the campus 'more green' are not made aware to the general CMU community.
There had been no method of communication amongst all stakeholders for sustainable efforts within Carnegie Mellon University. Hence, taking account to all the knowledge we had gathered, our team finally concluded to take our stakeholder’s concerns and create a web application in which the FMS can interact with the student body, students can be more informed about acts of conservation within the campus and CBPD can continue their efforts to submeter and better control energy consumption on campus.
final solution: connect fms
ConnectFMS is designed to break the communication barrier between Carnegie Mellon students & faculty, and the staff at Facilities Management Services with regards to campus energy usage. The workflow of this application is quite similar to that of Facebook. Through this application, students, faculty and staff can make posts on energy conservation issues they see around campus by taking a photo and writing a short description. Students, faculty and staff can consequently upvote/downvote on others' posts as well as express their thoughts on certain issues by commenting on others’ posts. Registered FMS staff will be able to view and address issues made through these posts and also make statuses on campus initiatives to go green. Students and faculty/staff will be able to like or comment on FMS statuses. These features will allow communication between the students/faculty and FMS to be more apparent.