Share Your Power
With pervasive displays making their way into residential environments, there are new experimental opportunities emerging for designing public displays as an interface between residents and the street.
The project investigated the effect of public real-time visualisation of domestic electricity in a local neighbourhood on energy conservation practices. A prototype was developed and deployed at two Sydney-based households, using a mechanical display system, known as flip-dot technology. Each display consists of a matrix of physical discs that are controlled electro-mechanically to either show a white or black dot.
The technology is highly energy-efficient as it only draws electricity for changing the content of the display. A further advantage over light-based display technologies is that flip-dot displays are visible even in bright daylight. A custom-built tablet web application allowed controlling the flip-dot displays from inside the house.
The system was evaluated through a 20-day field study. We found that the aesthetic quality, playful character, unusual ratio and the handcrafted quality of the casing that concealed any indication of technological complexity led to at least some acceptance of the display being part of the residential environment. It further led to conversations between residents and neighbours and visiting friends about the topic of energy usage and conservation.
People
Publications
- Hoggenmüller, M., Tomitsch, M., and Wiethoff, A. (2018). Understanding Artefact and Process Challenges for Designing Low-Res Lighting Displays. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI’18), ACM Press.
- Hoggenmueller, M., Wiethoff, A., Vande Moere, A., Tomitsch, M. (2018). A Media Architecture Approach to Designing Shared Displays for Residential Internet-of-Things Devices. Proceedings of the Media Architecture Biennale (MAB’18), Beijing, China, 2018, ACM Press.
- Tomitsch, M. (2014). Towards the real-time city: An investigation of public displays for behaviour change and sustainable living. Proceedings of the 7th Making Cities Liveable Conference, PANDORA Archive, National Library of Australia.