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Modern Energy

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Trial and Error: A Tinkering Workshop On How Yo Make The Most Out Of Minutes

Fingers, Electrical Currents, and Loud Buzzing Sounds

As a part of our tinkering workshop various tools were used to explore concepts relating to our initial idea of community oriented energy sharing and the immediacy of provoking thinking on energy as a non-commodity. Initially, we planned to stimulate community building in an SME through the BTTN tool: a button that sends out email, alerts, SMSs, and is connected to internet-services. The idea was to stimulate responses through negative reinforcement as users carried out daily activities that could be deemed as “wasteful” by their colleagues. Most community based activities are generated from a common culture, our goal therefore was to integrate a ‘tattletale tool’ to get co-workers to react in a playful way to wasteful consumption through virtual reminders of their behavior in the real world.

car

Feedback and Gamification: Provoking a Thought Process From Annoyance

Our game “Shut Me Up” provokes players to find quick solutions to annoying sounds through interacting with light in a tangible way. The main concept behind the game is to get players to find a quick solution to the loud buzzing sound which is stimulated by light exposure. In the process of building our game we used the LittleBits kit to transform electronic building blocks into a chain of controls that would enable us to control our vehicle as it roams around with a buzzing sound.

From Raw Data to 3D: A Creative Process

We started our “Kick-Off Week” at the MediaLab with an experience at the Maker’s Lab. To integrate ourselves into the design process that resolves around our project we explored problem oriented designs through the use of tools and machines to transfer our experiences and ideas into objects. Our initial project with Eneco asks the question: “How can we create community markets to empower smart citizens to trade and share self-harvested energy within the grid?” During our brainstorming session in the Maker’s Lab, we concluded that the mindset of people would be our main goal. In this process various other large scale problems, such as those with the political economy and hermeneutics were brought up. This highlighted how energy was grasped in the minds of global citizens as a commodity; a commodity that is easily accessible with the flick of a light switch or the simple gesture made by our fingers; a commodity that has an invisible chain of side-effects. Therefore, in the process of creating objects, our main theme amongst the displays were to get viewers to reflect on their personal consumption patterns.

 

From Group Diversity to Energy Habits & How Green Are We?

The following visualizations display a cycle of large scale industrial consumption in various countries. The model narrows down global energy consumption in our team members’ countries: Lebanon, Columbia, Thailand, Brazil, and The Netherlands. The mindset behind our 3D visualizations is to exercise the use of data presentation in a way that allows the viewers to interact with objects. During the process of making the plexiglass visualizations, we used recycled materials, the ones we used to create two models of energy consumption in our home countries. In the second model, the blue slices of visualization display the amount of green energy produced by the respective countries to give viewers a balanced view of consumption versus the production of energy — to pose the question does the production of green energy compensate for the use of energy?

 

Have A Perspective

The concept behind the model is to users closer to understanding energy consumption through a display of  the development of energy consumption in the Netherlands through time, in displaying the footprint of a country through a period of time (1982-2008). In the model, the intensity of the colors represent the increase of The Netherland’s footprint from the past to the present. The colors rage from a dark shade of red (representing heavy consumption) to yellow — displaying the reduction of energy use due to growing awareness.