Watt-Lite

Abstract

Increasing our knowledge of how design affects behaviour in the workplace has a large potential for reducing electricity consumption. This would be beneficial for the environment as well as for industry and society at large. In Western society energy use is hidden and for the great mass of consumers its consequences are poorly understood. In order to better understand how we can use design to increase awareness of electricity consumption in everyday life, we will discuss the design of Watt-Lite, a set of three oversized torches projecting real time energy statistics of a factory in the physical environments of its employees. The design of Watt-Lite is meant to explore ways of representing, understanding and interacting with electricity in industrial workspaces. We discuss three design inquiries and their implications for the design of Watt-Lite: the use of tangible statistics; exploratory interaction and transferred connotations.

Exploring the dimensions of eco-feedback in the wild

“…A similar study was performed by Jönsson et al (Jönsson et al, 2010), which consisted of a public display of electricity consumption made with three circular projections in the floor.…”

“…This type of system is often deployed as public displays that show collective behaviour, or make comparisons between the individual and the others (e.g. (Jönsson et al, 2010;Moere et al, 2011;Pierce et al, 2008)). …”

“…This installation was deployed in eight industries in Sweden and the research team observed that when placed in public places the installation promoted discussion between employees and some of them even made annotations next to the projections. (Moere et al, 2011); Middle: StepGreen Social network (Mankoff et al, 2010b); Right: Projections used in the WattLite prototype (Jönsson et al, 2010).…”

“…Several ideas emerged from the workshop, most of which looked at tangible ways of providing and sharing the eco-feedback from the households. The research team agreed that art and playfulness could play a major role in increasing the emotional connection between people, their energy consumption and the long-term effect on the environment, (motivated by, among others, the work of (Gustafsson and Gyllenswärd, 2005;Jönsson et al, 2010)). Ideas ranged from using a portrait of the family with different moods to map different consumption ranges, to a local newspaper reporting on the consumption of the apartment building as a ranking.…”

Cultivating energy literacy

“…In recent years, several studies investigated home energy consumption [7,33,34,40] and effects of interactive eco feedback [19,28,31]. The spectrum of eco feedback approaches and systems promoting a sustainable life style became very wide, reaching from artistic solutions like the PowerAware Cord [21], over pragmatic ones like the Kill-A-Watt and Watt-Lite [29] to HEMS that integrate multiple features in a home-oriented system of appliances.…”