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Power to the People

Google is very much working on ways to stimulate conservation of energy. One of the issues they mention on their blog is that by giving feedback to people it is possible to save lots of energy in homes and offices. Some time ago I was involved in a research study where we looked at research worldwide on this subject. One of the most remarkable ones was a study done in Stavanger, Norway. There it turned out that just by changing the period after which people settle their energy bill (you get a bill every month normally but only once a year the energy company checks if the bill is the same as the real (average) use during the year). They changed the period from one year to two months (meaning the amount used was checked bi-monthly and the bill adapted accordingly). The energy use of households after this went down 8%. Because of the bi-monthly check people where immediately reminded that energy costs a lot during winter. With some extra data the savings grew to 12 to 16%. This feedback on use can be more fine-grained. At home I am ...
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2009 02 11 Martijn Kriens EnergyTags: , , , Comments (0)

Everyware

One of the most interesting developments I see at the moment is the move to ubiquitous ICT. ICT in the form of small unobtrusive sensors, smart ICT that takes the context of the user into account (based on all those sensors) and feedback mechanisms to users that do not use explicit displays do this much more on an "experience" level, e.g. by changing the colour of light. I recently read a book called Everyware (as in Hardware and Software) that says some interesting things on this. Sort of like using computers without really using a computer.... A very nice example of this is the "unpronounceable rabbit". It connects to the Internet, is able to sniff RFID tags and communicate by talking, changing colours, communicates with his ears and all kinds of other things. And the rabbits can talk to eachother so you can send messages to a friend by just twisting his ears.
2008 11 26 Martijn Kriens everywareTags: , , Comments (1)