Development

I decided to look into some ways of displaying the titles, kitchen, lounge, etc. I tried different layouts with where they are placed and whether or not they are curved or straight.

Interface Design and Written Decription

Thomas Martin     112 - P2              Written Description

For my interface I wanted to make mine as simple as possible and not throw hard data and graphs at the user because many people find that to be intimidating. I still want to have some hard data for those that want it but not so much that it overpowers them and puts them off. The aim of my interface is to have a basic expanding system which tells the general ‘power usage attitude’ of the house and when expanded it can go into depth of which areas of the house are using the most energy and which ones are using the least. When further expanded it will show within those areas which appliances or which aspect of that area is using the power. This will be told through a simple pie graph which shows each appliance within the corresponding area and the power being used through the use of colours. Even further expanded shows the hard data, volts, price, etc. The majority of the interface will be circles, to fit with the basic attitude and to get more people to easily interact with it. This will all be done on a computer due to most people having access to some form of computer in the home.

More Concepts

 Some more concepts I had was to have a diagram of a house with each room being represented by an icon which tells what goes on in there and is coloured to show the level of energy being used.

I thought of having a "family tree" like system where it opens up and shows the details of each room and how much energy is being used. I don't like this as much as some of the others though because it seems to basic.

The one I have chosen to go with is the circles that expand out. I have decided to us the graph system seen in 'scanner.exe' and use that in my interface.

I was looking at ways to make my interface more fun and engaging by when you click on the specific area it opens up random data, for example: how many polar bears you killed, or pigeons killed due to your energy used in that area. I also thought about showing each appliance within those areas and how much they contribute to the overall area.

I looked at the lines connecting the circles as well and thought that I should have them so that the closer they are to the center the more energy they are consuming.
Also one thing I forgot to mention was that each circle will have an outer ring which is either coloured red, orange or green. This is just for a quick overview of the area and whether or not it is good on energy or bad.

Precedent Images and Research

 My first image shows the Xbox 360 avatar system and I think that would get a lot of kids/teens involved. Also as you win, you could get points which could be used to buy items for your character.

The image on the left shows the program "Scanner.exe" which measures where all your hard drive space is going and what programs are taking up the most space. I really like the style of graph on this program and I would really like in incorporate it into my interface.

While looking at existing power monitoring devices I found that there are countless different types out there. There are ones that you plug into a socket, ones for your Iphone and for computers. The list just goes on and on.

These devices don't look very user friendly though and that is something I want to address in my own design, make it so people want to use it.

I found that Google is one company who is trying to make a change in energy consumption and is trying to really use less power. Before this project I did not know Google was a energy considerate company.

Initial Ideas

I found with the device that I bought to measure the power usage it was kind of complicated to understand and the instructions were not very easy to follow. I decided that I didn't want mine to be too complicated to scare people.

I began with a quick brainstorm highlighting what I wanted to achieve with my interface and some quick ideas for it.

I then drew up some quick concepts. One I thought was cook was the "heartbeat" of the house. It is like those machines at the hospital which show a heartbeat with a moving line and I thought if your house is going overboard on energy use, it could be rapidly moving.
Another cool one I thought of was having something like Xbox 360's avatars and create it into a competition to use the least energy based on each person's room.
Another simple one was having a circle which expands and opens up more circles for each area of the house.

Project 2

For project 2 the aim is to create an interface which gets people to be more aware of power consumption. For this over the holidays we were tasked with keeping an energy usage diary.

 I monitored my laptop and used a power monitor device to measure it's voltage, wattage, price etc. I found that while plugged in charging but not turned on it is still using a very tiny amount of energy. When turned to the max settings, playing games I found that over the period of one hour my laptop used a total of 10c worth of energy, about 0.1 KW/h. If I was to do this everyday for 10 hours the cost would rapidly begin to rise and my parents would not be happy.