Exploring Digital Twins' Opportunities for Home Energy Sustainability: From a Service Design Approach

Digital Twins (DTs) have been widely applied in industrial and urban contexts to optimize systems, yet their potential to enhance energy awareness in everyday domestic life remains under explored. This paper investigates how DT-enabled services can support energy sustainability in smart homes. Adopting a service design approach, we conducted a three-phase process: (1) expert interviews (N=8) to identify opportunities to integrate DTs in smart homes, 2) co-design workshops with designers (N=18) to generate service scenarios, and (3) prototyping and co-constructing stories with end-users (N=10) to develop and evaluate a energy budgeting tool concept. The resulting prototype, EnergyBud, explores how DTs can function as dynamic mediators in shared living environments, providing predictive and collaborative energy insights to support everyday energy practice. The insights of our study's results proposed a DT-enabled service design scheme in smart homes, highlighting how DTs can not only be optimization tools but also enablers of sustainable domestic ecosystems.