Re-imagining the energy dashboard display
How I went from boring numbers to cute little people with no trousers
It has been claimed that as much as 95% of our communication is nonverbal. As the old saying goes, its not what you say its how you say it. Nonverbal communication includes among other things, body language, gestures, posture, facial expression and eye contact. Aspects of the voice such as pitch, volume, rhythm, intonation and stress is also included in the definition of nonverbal. Note that verbal communication is not synonymous with oral communication.
Have a look at the three bikers below. Can’t you feel how the middle guy is struggling? And how enjoyable the ride is for the guy going downhill? It’s easy to put ourselves in the position of the three bikers and feel empathy for them.
The bikers show three potential states of a graph, constant, increasing and decreasing. The question I asked myself what whether you could communicate something as complex as an energy monitoring system using empathy as the main mean of communication. Could you design an energy monitor without numbers?
We have worked on our fair share of energy related projects at IDEO. We know it a tricky problem for many reasons. A while back, we installed an energy monitoring system from a company called Agilewaves in our office as we’re trying to get greener ourselves. This system stores data on our electricity, water, and natural gas usage. The system’s interface has been displayed frequently on our lobby TV. As part of a white space project, we decided to explore custom visualisations to see if we could reduce the studio energy use.
The Agilewaves information display
NONVERBAL INFORMATION AND EMPATHY
Inspired by our amazing ability to understand nonverbal information and the simple fact that nobody knows what the @#&$%! kWh really means, I decided to ditched as many of the numbers and as much text as possible. Later, when showing the concepts around the office, most people did not even reflect on their absence. I wanted to communicate through other means than numbers but still preserve some of the utility of numbers that allows people to understand how much energy is being used and changes over time. There are some truly beautiful info-graphics out there that show our use of energy but they can be hard to ‘read’ and they are not the type of displays you find useful to look at day after day.
THE NEW CONCEPT
The concept is simple. Every day a new layer is added in-front of the previous day. The layer is added over the course of 24 hours so that it starts form the left edge of the screen and goes to the right edge. In the examples below you can see that the water consumption display is somewhere in the morning where as the electricity consumption display show the time of day being sometime in the evening. The height of the hill or wave indicate the level of consumption. As you can see, the consumption pattern for our electricity consumption is quite predictable. The water consumption is less so (and also less accurate since I’ve not done a proper to confirm how the real data looks).
Each scene has a protagonist who makes the journey across the screen and is intended to be animated in place (like the three bikers above). The biker would be peddling and the surfer would be riding the wave.
Depending on the trend of the data the protagonist would have a harder or easier time moving forward. If the energy consumption is on the way up, the biker and the surfer have to work hard uphill/upwave. If the consumption is trending downwards, the biker can coast downhill and the surfer can ride the wave. The idea being that you can imaging yourself in their shoes and empathise with the protagonists and want to help them out.
The scene, which is really graphs in disguise give you the ability to understand relationships and trends throughout the week (as is the case in the weekly view of energy usage below). The layers give you some historical context by allowing you to compare with the peaks of previous weeks sticking out in the background.
Nonverbal information is no stranger to the interaction designer, on the contrary, we use colour, spacing, contrast, movement etc to communicate information. I wanted to take this concept a step further and use people’s ability for empathy towards others to encourage behaviour change.
I realise that the whole idea can seem a bit whimsical but considering the context of an office lobby, I wanted to create something that had an element of storytelling. Something to delight and something to start a conversation that would hopefully contribute to behaviour change.
