As homes begin to lean into autonomous systems to decide when a battery charges or when to trade energy with the grid, households can see what their system did, but not why. This dissertation is Research through Design based study aiming to explore that gap: what does it actually take for a non-technical participant to understand, trust, and stay meaningfully in control of decisions an AI is making on their behalf?

Working across research, design and engineering, I built a spectrum of four working prototypes, from a plain facts dashboard through to one that justifies its choices via alternative reasoning, and tested them against twelve non-technical participants through think-aloud sessions and interviews.