(Greener Gadgets) Saving the World...One Meter at a Time

It is the eve of the Greener Gadgets conference. I checked out the 50 finalists when they were announced a few weeks ago (happy to see a couple of frog submissions in there like the CompostAll and the WattBlocks concepts). I counted close to twenty energy meters or vampire plugs of some kind.  There has been a lot of buzz around rise of 'Personal Informatics' and the central role that it will play in behavior change (see this nice post from Joshua Porter at The Pop!techblog). Josh is not the only one with a great deal of faith in a future in which our lives are embellished with tiny data displays that track our consumption behavior in real time. Google recently announced the Google Power Meter while simultaneously reducing much of their social innovation activities in other areas (atleast according to this article on google.org from the New York Times).

As a designer, I can't help but be disappointed by the lack of imagination that is driving this emphasis on data displays and graphing tools.  Is a blinking meter really the best that we can come up with as a means of influence? For the sake of our future I hope not.  To be fair these solutions have demonstrated positive impacts on personal energy consumption. But so have smiley faces on electric bills. Here is my interpretation - a quick mockup I threw together for my talk at IxDA (special credit goes to Minjung Sohn from Dept. of Industrial Design, KAIST as I hacked this out of one of the renderings they submitted to CHI).

As you use more energy Cheney smiles, as you use less he frowns and fades away. Just imagine coming home to a house full of twinkling Cheneys if you leave the lights on or your laptop plugged in. This concept may seem purely  provocative - but that is precisely the point! Faces are powerful emotional triggers. We have a special area of our brains devoted specifically to the task of facial recognition. We can easily recognize changes in facial expression from across a room - a level of immediacy we will never achieve with a bar graph like this one:

This example comes from our friends at Ambient Devices. The basic foundation of this approach is nothing new: Tracking, Analysis and Reporting. Behavioral studies have shown that this type of solution is best for things that we are not already aware of. But it is much less effective in areas where we have a high level of awareness, like calorie consumption and fairly soon, kilowatt consumption. As the number of displays increase we will start to tune them out. Meters are not motivators! Just think about the nutrition information on food packaging. Useful but not very motivating. It is easy to imagine a day when these static displays will be replaced with e-ink so we can see our calorie consumption change in real time with each oreo that we eat. It won't take long before people tune that out too.

So what works? Given the number of new capabilities and communication tools at our disposal it is time to radically rethink this approach and embrace a broader set of opportunities. There are some very good design principles out there that we can build on. The first is 'Saliency'. Instead of providing feedback in the form of a meter or a chart, why not think of a way to transform that data so that it is more salient - meaningful to the consumer. The folks at WattsOn have done a crude but effective job of this:

At least they have taken the simple step of converting the data into dollars. With good design this could be taken a whole lot further. Are you familiar with the National Debt Clock in Times Square? People stop and stare at this billboard all the time - in horror! This is because you are watching your own money disappear, in hyperreal time. The folks at Nudge have written about the principle of 'Loss Aversion': we are much more motivated by losing something we already have (like money) than gaining something new.

But that is just the start. Now imagine inserting a little social influence in the form of local comparison or pledging. The Tweet-a-Watt (another green gadget submission) gets the ball rolling. Pair that with stickk and we might have something. There are many behaviorial mechanisms that we can pull from, like Social Conformity and Periodic (instead of regular) Reinforcement (that is how gambling works) to dramatically increase the influence of our designs. I am convinced that, once these social dynamics kick in, the meters will disappear for good. Hopefully we will see more evidence of that type of thinking in the next crop of 'greener gadgets'. Who knows: maybe they wont be gadgets at all!

As frog's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant leads efforts to expand the impact of design into new markets and industries. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert is lead partner in Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat HIV and AIDS in South Africa. He is an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.