The Future Currents team, working with householders and energy experts, created a series of ideas, concepts and proposals to help householders save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
‘We wanted to transform people from being passive consumers of energy to active managers,’ says Chris Vanstone, a design consultant on the project, ‘so we focused on four areas: home monitoring, rewarding good energy use, peer power and hot products.’
People need to take control of their energy use, but many of them don’t know how much they are using. ‘Energy is invisible which makes it difficult to control,’ says Jennie Winhall. ‘We can give people the tools to monitor their own energy use – studies show that if people can see what they’re using, they use up to 15 per cent less energy.’
The team’s first idea was an independent energy report that would collate information from each of a householder’s energy suppliers and then provide the low-down on not only its cost, but also its environmental impact. You could compare your spend with the average in the UK and see how much energy you’re using in comparison with the previous year. ‘It’s not a bill, it’s transparent information,’ says Chris Vanstone.
And to check how much energy you are using each day, the team came up with a Home Monitoring Display. This is a beautifully designed gadget that would be based in your kitchen and would alert you when the kids have turned on the TV upstairs, let you know how much energy you are wasting by leaving the video on standby and whether the oven uses more energy than the microwave. It would also work out the best time to run the washing machine and could monitor your energy use in real time.
To keep track of energy use and bills, the team also developed an energy tracker for PCs. It would let you see, on your computer, how much money your heating system is wasting, help you find out why you're using more energy than other people living in identical houses and enable you to set a budget for next month and then track your progress in sticking to it.
