— preservenergy project

Our journey so far

It is just six weeks into the project and it already seems like an eternity since we started! We’ve been trying hard to get smart about the domains we are trying to work in, learn from experiences of other people and start making some initial sketches about the kind of system we’d like to design. We’re tackling a problem that a lot of people have tried to tackle and we believe that the value we can provide in terms of overall system design will be our key differentiator. So here’s the topic that we have decided to pursue:

How do you create behavioral change towards energy consumption at home?

Quite a task we’ve set ourselves! The first aspect to the problem is the issue of behavioral change. There seems to be a lot of automatic behavior (see already in place for things like turning off lights, modulating the thermostat, conserving water etc that is already in place. Changing this is going to be hard. The second aspect is energy consumption at home. How many of you are aware of the amount of energy that is consumed at home? Whether it is electricity, natural gas or water? If you are aware, what would you do with that information? Would learning that your fridge is the most wasteful appliance at home actually make a difference of whether you continue using it? Most likely not. That kind of information would likely piss you off and you turn of the monitoring completely. Those are the kinds of things we want to avoid, and better still, design for, so that the emotions that the system evokes is not an extreme one (A lot of this is from our interview with Don Norman, read our highlights post).

Back to our journey so far. We started out extremely broad with the topic of “Humanizing the Internet of Things”. A lot of research later, we realized that we would quickly need to focus in on a specific part of this burgeoning field. What excites us is that there is a lot of momentum in this field and a lot of large companies are pouring in a lot of money to achieve this vision, which is broadly that all the devices, appliances and objects around us connected and constantly streaming information about themselves and their surroundings. Now what we do with that data is the important question. With the right amount of intelligence and visualization, we can drive that up the information pyramid as below.

So we narrowed our focus to two fields namely social networks and energy consumption. What would be the future of social networks assuming a future scenario where objects around us will be able to communicate on our behalf? And the other is the topic that you see above. After much consideration of both areas and speaking to some interesting people relating to the two fields, we decided to focus on energy management. Below is a snapshot of our process so far.

Back to energy again. There are a ton of companies that have created products and services in this area. Some worth mentioning are DIY Kyoto’s Wattson, Current Cost and Kill-a-watt. Larger companies like Belkin, Microsoft and Google are also playing in this field. But the issue is that most of them have failed or haven’t been able to create an impact in the market. There are possibly several reasons for this – people don’t really value having their energy monitored, the technology is too high a barrier for initial set up and remains in the territory of DIY enthusiasts or just simply that their products aren’t getting it right. This is the landscape as it exists now (this isn’t exhaustive of course).

We are very excited with the direction we have so far and are looking forward to creating something of value. We would love to hear what you think about our topic so far! Please comment below!