Energy Awareness Visualisations

We don’t really think about it day to day but we live in an energy grid, a complex system of infrastructure and activity of which we know only the vaguest details and definetly rarely think about beyond plugging the light in when its dark. But that really has to change soon, if we are going to understand, manage and limit our energy consumption and change our behaviours. We can all be a little more responsible if we are given the information and tools to do something. Following this way of thinking a few new projects and ideas which cover this same ground have come up recently. Click through to read further.

How in the future you could bring this information direct to people, well Dan Hill has been busy thinking about what the future might bring with the personal well-tempered environment. Its a brilliant post worth reading and disecting at length.

In Helsinki a slice of this vision for a short time will come true Pixelache is organising an art installation nuage vert (vihreä pilvi) which will illuminate the smoke plume of Salmisaari power station in Helsinki according to how much energy is being used at the time by the citisens of Helsinki. The light installation is by HeHe and will run for a week between 22nd and 29th February 2008. (via)

However nuage vert is a macro art installation and taking eco visualisation or at least data collection to a more practical and achievable short term level is ecoterrace, a project by Rob Annable’s office. They have upgraded an existing terrace house row, and will be monitoring it and publishing the results on the ecoterrace blog. The thing I like most about this project is that it is easy to build an eco house from scratch, but another thing to upgrade an existing building, its just messier and more compromises have to be made, but ecoterrace while not breaking any new ground building wise will set a bar for communication and hopefully monitoring of a real project, so congratulations to everyone involved.

image above is of nuage vert by Hehe below is ecoterrace by axis design (flickr set)