The Interactive Institute has a range of energy consumption interfaces, devices and services designed to feedback to folk about the amount of energy that they are consuming and possibly also to influence their behaviour with respect to their energy consumption. These include:
- The Energy Coach - a service to help you take better control of energy usage
- The Energy AWARE Clock - a feedback device that visualises the spikes of energy usage in your household on a clockface.
- The Energy Plant - an LCD that visualises household electricty consumptions as a growing plant
Many of the ideas in isolation are not entirely novel although they do have a shiny factor that isn't to be found in similar offerings elsewhere. For example, OPower have a similar system that they describe as their smart grid front-end. This is designed to influence customer behaviour through a combination of feedback via a hardware peripheral, good usage analytics and visualisation, and social influence, e.g. see how much energy you are consuming compared with the aggregated consumption of your neighbours.
One of the interesting things that the Interactive Institute is doing is combining serious games with energy consumption monitors. The important thing I find with this approach is having a game that is worth playing in the first place. Once you have done that I can imagine a game in which data from the sensors in your, and possibly your neighbours houses, affect the game world. Increased energy consumption might negatively affect the variety or amount of game items available. Other things, such as running a higher consumption device at a peak usage time might affect how exciting or dangerous the game world is.
No comments:
Post a Comment