Plugwise is a company making various devices to assist in energy savings. The devices that target’s standby energy usage… sometimes called ghost loads, are mostly what this post is about. Unlike a lot of energy savings devices, Plugwise is not marketed exclusively to the home market, as plug loads happen every where! They suggest that
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the Loop: Keeping you, …well, in the loop
Momentarily stepping away from the land of the experimental, the Loop energy savings kit is a very reasonably priced, off-the-shelf tool available for UK home-based energy savings. Created by Navetas, “a UK based technology company delivering cloud-based energy monitoring and smart data analytics for the connected home,” the system, which works independently of one’s energy provider, tracks electricity use,
PowerViz: The balance of power tips to the ambient and artistic.
The paper “Design of an Appliance Level Eco-Feedback Display for Domestic Electricity Consumption” presents us with “the design, implementation, and field study of PowerViz, an always-on eco-feedback display,intended to increase consumers’ awareness about electricity usage at an appliance level consumption.” PowerViz attempts to balance the pragmatic depiction of energy information with a more artistic intervention, in order to garner
Design experiments for the unconscious.
Sometimes its fun to take a look at conceptual papers, which have prototypes that haven’t yet been made or put into the world for testing. They are often short “thought exercises” in design, where researchers and practitioners play aloud with the relationship between a theoretical concept and actual objects. The short paper “Designing with unconscious
Robots in your sink, pouring your water, and sharing secrets.
At this point, this paper is almost 10 years old, but in my quest to learn everything on the topic of ecofeedback, one must do some digging. I’m assuming at the time of this paper’s presentation LED lit faucets were not a thing you could just order off the internet – such is the steady march
PEACOX: Helping you walk (or bike or drive) the sustainble walk.
Peacox is a mobile application that looks to “motivate users to use more environmentally-friendly modes of transport and thus reduce their CO2 emissions.” (source) In order to do this, the design of the user interface makes use of numerous persuasive strategies, including “tunneling” and “suggestion” (i.e. guiding the user towards the greenest choice via the
Upstream: People don’t know what will motivate them, until it does.
The article “UpStream: Motivating Water Conservation with Low-Cost Water Flow Sensing and Persuasive Displays” by Stacey Kuznetsov and Eric Paulos presents the results of research in a number of approaches to water conservation encouragement in both public and private environments. The goal of the project was not only to decrease water consumption at the point of
Real-time archaeology: Visualizing urban waste.
In the paper “Jetsam: Exposing our Everyday Discarded Objects,” authors Eric Paulos and Tom Jenkins propose an “urban probe” as a tool to solicit thought, wonderment, and contemplation. The project aims to solicit a conversation around the use of technology in urban environments and how this might influence our behaviour in cities. The project include an “augmented trashcan”
The flavour of the month: Paper-saving.
In the paper “Curbing Paper Wastage Using Flavoured Feedback,” researcher Richard Medland introduces an experiment in a certain tailoring of feedback with the goal of reducing paper wastage in a university setting. The main objective of the project is to better understand the motivation of staff in terms of more sustainable printing practices, and in this vein
Coralog: A plea to idle no more.
In the paper “Coralog: Use-Aware Visualization Connecting Human Micro-Activities to Environmental Change,” the authors Tanyoung Kim, Hwajung Hong, and Brian Magerko introduce us to, well, Coralog, a computer widget that draws a parallel between computer idle time and the health of coral reefs. In the paper “Designing for Persuasion:Toward Ambient Eco-Visualization for Awareness,” the same
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