How Cool Does Your Electricity Look?
July 22nd, 2010 | Published in Alternate Environments, Design, Innovation, Sustainability, Technology, Workplace Trends
Author: Mike McKeown (13 Articles)
Mike is a Senior Interior Designer in the HOK Chicago office, usually wearing many hats, including: up front space planning strategies, managing the technical design process as well as Construction Administration. Originally from Philadelphia, Mike attended Carnegie Mellon University where he studied Industrial Design (and is excited with what HOK has been doing with its Product Design efforts). He has lived in Chicago for ten years and enjoys searching for cool new restaurants, running, swimming, biking, working on his cooking skills, seeing comedy shows and live music.
Interesting conceptual project from textile designer Celine Marcq: reactive wallcovering that abstractly visualizes energy use. The idea is that your wall can help indicate how much electricity you are using, ideally making us all more conscious in general. This would be especially helpful for those people who have bad habits of leaving everything plugged in. The ambient light is a reminder that even though something isn’t turned on, if it’s plugged in it’s still pulling in electricity. Gets rid of the whole “out of sight, out of mind” mentaility that gets us in trouble in oh so many instances.
Monitoring and displaying energy isn’t necessarily a brand new concept. Several quality companies are leading the effort to track energy usage. My colleague David Ivey recently posted on HOK Life about measures we’re taking in our Chicago office, implementing Lutron Quantum and EcoSystem to monitor and display energy usage. These measures have helped our Chicago office be recognized as one of the top ten LEED projects in 2009 according to Interiors and Sources Magazine
The reactive wallcovering is definitley a step in a more aesthetic direction to keep us informed of energy usage. I’m sure pretty soon our offices will be these Matrix-esque environments displaying all types of information. Hopefully the visual overload won’t be too seizure-inducing. I would like to hear of any other examples of aesthetic ways to monitor energy or raise awareness that any of you readers have come across.
