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Rebecca Ford

Postdoctoral Fellow

DPhil (Engineering) University of Oxford, MEng (class 1, Engineering) Trinity College, University of Oxford

Tel 64 3 470 3577
Email rebecca.ford@otago.ac.nz

Rebecca Ford is a postdoctoral fellow in the Marketing Department, with a research interest in bringing a consumer focussed human dimension to engineering and technical solutions, specifically targeted towards reducing household energy consumption.

Rebecca is associated with the university’s Centre for Sustainability: Agriculture, Food, Energy and the Environment (CSAFE). Her current research projects are primarily focussed on the development of technology to enhance the way individuals interact with their energy consumption data. These include an investigation into consumer preferences for graphical presentation of electricity feedback from a real time appliance level system, the impact of disaggregated feedback and actionable advice on motivation and specific behavioural intentions, and the effect of different feedback visualisations on energy literacy and behaviour intention. Becky is also working with Mercury Energy in a longitudinal study to explore the effect of these different feedback visualisations on both the short term and long term energy consumption and data interaction patterns in New Zealand households.

Before coming to the University of Otago, Becky completed a DPhil in the Engineering Department at the University of Oxford in the UK. Becky was working under the supervision of Dr Malcolm McCulloch in the Electrical Power Lab, on a research project titled 'Reducing domestic energy consumption through behaviour modification'. The background premise to the project was that consumers could be influenced in their domestic electricity consumption patterns by real time information about the electrical consumption of individual appliances in their home. The outcome of the research was the development of techniques and algorithms that could be used to determine the type of appliances switching on and off within a circuit, by measurement of just the total current and voltage supplied to the circuit.