Enough power to move: dimensions for representing energy availability

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. Meanwhile some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.