Energy Plant
The Energy Plant is an ambient transparent LCD-display that shows the electricity consumption of the household in the form of a growing plant. The device is connected wirelessly to the domestic electricity meter. Each month, a new type of digital seed is “planted” and starts to grow on the screen. Modest electricity consumption result in a thriving fast growing plant and heavy consumption makes the plant wither and this is shown on the transparent screen. The idea is that the display can be placed in a window like an ordinary plant or elsewhere. The inspiration for the design was taken from two existing lifestyles; gardening - the fascination of making real plants grow, and the gaming lifestyle where one, for example, is trying to enhance online characters in a game. Taking care of the Energy Plant means thinking about your electricity consumption while enjoying the reward to see the plant grow.
The transparent display of the energy plant serves several purposes. During sunny days it can cast a shadow of the plant that wanders through the room drawing attention back to the display and its message. It also serves the purpose of enhancing the information shown on the display instead of the display itself. The inverted shape of the pot together with the information shown on the display conveys the story of the growing plant.
The Energy Plant has only two buttons located on its front; an info button and a history button. The info button toggles additional information on and off for those who want to take a closer look at the rate of their consumption. When enabled this feature shows your current electricity consumption in kilowatts (kW) and the overall consumption for this month in kilowatt hours (kWh). The history button allows you to go back one month, and a plant, at a time. In this way, previous months results are always kept and can be viewed whenever desired. If the info button is activated one can also compare the overall electricity usage of the different months and the outcome that results in a specific plant.
The Energy Plant is an attempt to break away from the traditional screen-based type of interaction in the context of energy metering – it is an ambient display that provides information with little effort from the user. A quick glance at it should be enough to tell if the home-consumption is low or high and it should also give a hint on consumption figures previous days. Moreover, it can be said to be an attempt to move away from the general PC to small specific computational devices (Weiser, 1991) in an effort to make it more understandable and usable for the consumer.
The idea behind using a seed metaphor and planting it every month serves several ends. First is the aforementioned idea of starting with a seed and seeing it grow. The users’ electricity behaviours alter the way the plants grow much as a real plant is affected by the amount of water it gets. Moreover, starting with a new seed every month creates curiosity about what is about to come and a chance to start over in case last month’s plant didn’t turn out as desired. The user can never be sure what kind of plant that will come out of a certain seed. The seed could, for example, be distributed from the energy company and communicated through the invoice and also shared between the consumers.
