From "Total Consumer Energy by Fuel, MED 2010 Energy Data File", a pie graph shows a statistical proportion of electricity (27%) being used. In Renewable Electricity Generation from http://www.level.org.nz/energy/renewable-electricity-generation/ around 69% of New Zealand residential energy use is electricity. From this website it explains that there are companies that can generate renewable energy. Student's however have no time, nor money to go to such extremities thus a smaller, more manageable way for reducing the energy we use is needed.
Lecture slides by Andrew Smith shows a pie graph of the average household energy use: lighting 29%, electronics 4%, cooking 26%, refrigeration 4%. Though not all appliances necessarily rely on electricity to run on, from these statistics we are using a lot of energy to run our daily lives.
Using the "diary template" from firstyeardesign.com I have monitored my energy usage and as a student this strikes me as a target market to be aimed at because saving energy will also save money which is twice the benefit (as students are relatively money-conscious).There are a number of appliances I use; curler, hairdryer, computer, hard drive and my lamp. My diary template has made me aware of how often I leave my computer for example running even when I'm not using it and go to sleep, leaving my lamp on thinking I'll need it again when I end up watching movies in our common room and how I blow dry my hair for ages when I could simply dry off excess water beforehand. Particularly on weekends, I leave my lamp on running about 10.5 Watts for hours not using it.
The available technology to renew energy at the moment in the industry is expensive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy states that globally only 16% of energy being used comes from renewable's. This statistic is an extremely small proportion. Awareness of people usage of energy should be promoted, renewable technology is being introduced to rural and remote places but there is always more to do. Monitoring our usage, is the first step to changing the way we endlessly devour energy.
Energy meter presentation (lecture slideshow) by Andrew Smith; suggestions for monitoring energy use, help people use less energy and therefore save money, cut down on bills where energy bills are higher than they should be, minimize waste, maximize efficiency and gathering data to put in perspective our consumption levels.
From the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" the narrator Davis Guggenheim tells us that "changes can come suddenly". If an issue is not on the tips of their tongues its "easy to ignore" because people will always be asking of other factors, "what does that have to do with us?" a breed of ignorance.
Davis Guggenheim: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, its what we do know" that harms us.
112 Lecture (guest lecturers) notes: advertising is a medium of convincing people. Without representing awareness there is no change. To help contextualize energy it must be represented in a way that people can understand it because energy like money is an abstract concept.
Augmented Behavior thought does not equal behavior. To guide someone to do something you must find implicit (subtle) ways of influencing behavior; generally thought process comes after behavioral change. Reach into the subconscious to go after the conscious HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY.
Many interfaces about energy consumption out there in the internet compromise mostly of data, pie charts ect which does not help the population understand energy.
Combine "looking cool" with a message. Abstraction = remove to provide the emotional link.
Organize data to make sense ("a nice wire frame").
"Future generations may look back on us with anger, having all this energy and having competition to WASTE IT ALL."
Concepts
Wire-frame
Written Description
Paper Prototype
PART TWO:
From recent discovery, asking people about what they thought of Facebook, I found that many were slightly irritated that this social network had packed its system with many adds, and apps for "spying" for lack of a better word on their friends. In short, Facebook was starting to over think and make their interface a bit too complicated, however I found, talking to the same people that they still use it.
Taking this into account, I decided to still use Facebook as the means of logging in my application but keep it there, for the sake of simplicity.
Having the navigation at the bottom did put some of my users off when I tested it, so to make it slightly easier, I animated it so that when people rolled over the buttons, they would be highlighted, outlining their use, more. To emphasis which page they were on, I also created an outline around the buttons so that my users knew which page they were on.
As for the home button, I made it into a triangle, distinguishable from the rest.
Looking at my concept I decided to use the Egyptian hierarchy as a model for my flash project because I thought that it made sense and would fit in because of the correlation to triangles, I deemed this fitting so I also used a colour scheme that reflected the culture of Egypt using hues of gold, yellow and brown.
I looked at Egyptian people from the times where Pharaoh's were rulers and created simple cartoon characters for my Character hierarchy using the above images I had searched through as referencing.
When I saw the drawings/imagery they created, I decided to do something similar, drawing on paper to give it an "ancient" sort of feeling.
The triangle is separated into to five ranks, labelled, but as for which one takes precedent over the others in the rows, I decided to leave it as it was, allowing users to interpret which ever way they can.
Near the end of making my application, I decided to use sound for the buttons to create a bit more user interaction. However for the bricks, they seemed to be stuck in a loop for some reason (which was very annoying), no matter what I do to fix it, so instead I changed it to separating and combining again in a loop; this solved the problem of the sound, and engaged my testers in a slightly different way which was more than looking at the static image.
