The start page also features an advert with the tongue-in-cheek notion of “painting” with the PowerMeter.

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The Edenbee blog has a post today about a sweet-looking smart meter (designed by IDEO) from German utility company Yello Strom, that integrates with Google PowerMeter and Twitter.  While it may not seem very practical to stream energy data through Twitter, it’s offerings like this, that open up the energy data stream, that will enable the kind of third-party experimentation and innovation that is sorely needed in the space.  BusyBee points out,

While adding Twitter to their mix will undoubtedly give Yello Strom a PR-boost, the larger goal is to feed energy data into any tool customers may be using. As explained by Yello Executive Director Martin Vesper, “Our goal is to use as many different channels as possible to inform our customers about their energy consumption.”

See also this original posting at Springwise.

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Yet another energy awareness savvy article appears this weekend in the New York Times.  It discusses the powerful motivator of friendly competition to modify energy use behavior.  When people have a notion of normal behavior, they tend to change what they do.

Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies how to get Americans — even those who did not care about the environment — to lower energy consumption. And while there are many ways, Dr. Cialdini said, few are as effective as comparing people with their peers.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”

A couple of programs mentioned in the article:

BrainShift Foundation Energy Smackdown

Central College PODS Dorm

Quality Attributes Software Green Touchsreen used on the PODS Dorm

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Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

If you read it all the way through, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

After Nov. 4, Worldchanging, Viridian Movement’s most visible offshoot on the web, launched Inaugurate Change, a call for the incoming administration to set the nation on a course to carbon neutrality by 2030. It’s a call to the Viridian ideal:

The things we must create to fight climate change are also the things we need to generate a strong economic recovery: livable cities, clean energy, green jobs, new technologies, better transportation, healthy forests and thriving family farms.

And if you are still at all skeptical that the times have changed, it is worth considering this humble little form on a new web site called change.gov.

The government coming into power now has an active videoblog, and it wants to hear from you.

Energy & Environment Form on change.gov

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Today is World Usability Day 2008, and this year’s theme is transportation.  As part of the day’s events, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) has announced the Global Transport Challenge, which includes a little web-based carbon calculator.

It’s an easy way for you to understand how you use transportation everyday and the impact it has on our environment.

You will be able to:

• MEASURE your everyday transportation usage
• MONITOR your  personal carbon travel footprint and compare yourself to othersaround the world
• MINIMIZE your energy usage through alternative transportation choices, carbon offsets, and simple travel changes  thereby maximizing the impact on our world.

Today there are World Usability Day events in over 40 countries, many will be webcast,  and some will take place online only.   World Usability Day is a UPA initiative to

provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere. [Link]

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In recent weeks, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, has hinted at the company’s broad interest in the energy business. He also joined Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to announce that they would collaborate on policies and technologies aimed at improving the electricity grid. The effort could include offering tools for consumers.

Meanwhile, engineers at Google are hoping to unveil soon tools that could help consumers make better decisions about their energy use. (Emphasis added)

Of related interest, for those not familiar with Google.org’s green initiatives, it’s worth taking a look:

RechargeIT: An “initiative that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles.”

RE<C: “RE<C will work to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that is cheaper than electricity produced from coal.”

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With the iPhone platform there is definitely a lot of potential for bringing these types of tools into the social sphere – each of these could be turned into interfaces for web-based hypermiling competitions with friends, for example.

AccuFuel

As with all of these apps, AccuFuel focuses on changes in your odometer and the amount of fuel you get at the pump. I have played with this one a bit. It has a nice widget feel to it – simple interactions and easy data entry. You can set it up to track mileage for more than one car and flip through them just as you can flip through multiple cities in the iPhone weather app. This is more graphical than most – trends over multiple time frames are shown graphically. By Appigo.  ($.99 in iTunes)

Car Care

From the look of it, this app gives you a little more power, if you want it. It does a little more than mileage tracking – you can use it to set car maintenance reminders, which may be handy if you base such things on distance driven. It looks like there’s a little more granularity for those that want it – you can track city vs. highway miles, regular vs. super/premium fuels, and price. There is an import feature if you’ve been keeping data on your computer. This one also has a little visual design and a graphical trending screen. By KB Productions. ($4.99 in iTunes)

CarStat

CarStat uses more of a tabular layout and straight-up data entry approach.  I appreciated that CarStat starts up with some “dummy” data to show me how it works right off the bat.   I think that some of the interactions, such as the way the user calculates averages and totals, could be rethought to create a more fluid experience.  Calculation is naturally at the core of these types of applications, but I think moving these concepts beyond numbers — and into the experiential — is important. By Cogstorm. ($1.99 in iTunes)

FuelGauge

FuelGauge has a pretty attractive home screen (below) showing how my energy use is trending.  There are a few things about FuelGauge that remind that sometimes precision and power don’t always improve the experience — for example, telling FuelGauge I pumped 5 gallons takes 7 taps – some of them zeroes in “5.000″, since FuelGauge always wants its values to the third decimal place.  I expect for an app like this, I will usually want my interaction to be as quick as possible.  But it seems the developer of FuelGauge is putting a lot of attention into future iterations of the app so it may be one to watch.   By iphonecodemonkey. ($.99 in iTunes)

GasHog

Like CarStat, GasHog uses more of a tabular layout and straight-up data entry approach. I have not tried it out, though from the screenshots, it looks executed smartly, if a little dryly.   Again, I think moving these concepts into the experiential is important for engaging a lot of people.  Only geeks like you and me will really put up with a ledger book approach.  By Adair Systems. ($.99 in iTunes)

Miley

I haven’t tried this one out, but it looks like it has a little character and playfulness to it.  As we’ve seen here on Green Interfaces, fuel economy calculators don’t tend to have much of a human touch, so I like the effort.  Reviewers in iTunes also comment that Miley has great tips for helping improve economy, giving it an educational function that some of these lack.  By BunsenTech. ($1.99 in iTunes)

Mileage Tracker

Mileage Tracker seems to have gone a similar route as CarStat and GasHog – tabular data entry interface.  By Lemdisyn.  ($.99 in iTunes)

Tankbuch

Tankbuch comes from developers in Germany, and is available in English, French, and German.  It has the added advantage of being free – but users in the United States will probably not find it usable as only km/l units are available.  By osXwerk.  (Free in iTunes)

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If there is no “Printer Friendly Version” button to click, then GreenPrint’s free software might be the solution. The software does the reformatting for the user, so that efficient printing is fast, easy, and possible. Their goal is to save 100 million trees through extensive use of the program, hence why they’ve launched a free version.

.

(thanks, Kyra!)

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I can attest to the Kill-a-Watt’s usefulness, but I also found it kludgy, difficult, and uninspired. Yet, it’s the only product of its kind on the market in the United States. While I am glad that it’s available, I think that some basic usability problems with the device would have been avoided with a little user testing.

(I have heard that there are many such devices on the market in Europe and elsewhere, and would be interested in hearing if the others’ product designs — or lack thereof — are comparable.)

Button overkill

The Kill-A-Watt seems to give you a lot of power, what with all its buttons, one for each unit of measurement — but really, do I need to know the Volts, Amps, Hz, or VA of my Ikea lamp?* Actually, I only want to know about Watts, since that is the energy language I speak, as a home user. I’m not drawing up schematics or breaking out the soldering board. The device hasn’t yet outgrown its roots on the electrical engineering geek’s workbench.

This device doesn’t need any buttons. Let me connect a device to it, and make a Wattage reading: and I’m done. If the maker wants to make several units of measurement available, one button would suffice to make the setting, and the default should be Watts.

Those hard to reach places

Basic assumptions in the form factor design of the Kill-A-Watt present problems for me once I start to test appliances around the house. It plugs directly into a wall, and its LCD display is on the front face, so to make any readings I need to crouch down on the floor. That’s even more than a little annoying if I want to test the stuff that’s plugged in behind the couch.

One potential solution would be to place the display on the top of the device, so that I can make a reading from above. Even then, the display might still be hard to read if it’s in a cramped space, since it lacks a backlight. My solution is to plug the Kill-A-Watt into an extension cord, so that I can use the Kill-A-Watt like a handheld device. That way, I can make readings where it would otherwise be hard to read, and also test appliances plugged into outlets that simply won’t fit the Kill-a-Watt.

The Kill-A-Watt is only easy to use if you plug it in to an outlet at eye-level (preferably a workbench), and bring your stuff to it. Most of us, I’d wager, just want to test our appliances where they are.

Testing over time

You can also leave an appliance plugged in to the Kill-A-Watt for a length of time and make a reading of its accumulated kWh usage. This is certainly useful, since the energy many appliances pull oscillates or varies with types of use. My laptop computer, for example, might use 25 watts using a word processor, but 70 watts running a game.

This kind of measurement also hints at the kinds of calibration the Kill-a-Watt enables you to do. When I first tested a bunch of my home appliances, I jotted down the initial Watt reading for each and moved to the next. That helped me identify those weird vampires I didn’t expect* — on this first pass I removed over 100 Watts of continuous energy suck from my tiny apartment. (Chief among my strategies: power strips and just uplugging stuff when I’m not using them) Later, I took more time and measured my commonly used things over a period of a few days, to get a better look.

A transition device

The Kill-a-watt represents the kind of cheap and simple interface we need immediately, as it may be years before the average home is equipped with smarter metering and ambient feedback devices. The market has yet to be really explored, as far as I can tell. I think even small improvements in its usability, and a modest, incremental extension of its functions (perhaps adding easy upload of your appliance data to a computer via USB) would bring us a little closer to more efficient use of home energy.

* I found that my Ikea lamps, by way of poorly designed power adapters that apparently like to stay warm for no reason, pulled 6 watts on average when turned OFF.

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Significantly, the application connects the carbon footprint of my daily trips to actions I can take to offset it: on one tab, Eco2Go tells me how to take the same trip using public transit, and on another tab, it’s easy to buy carbon credits as I go. There’s a feedback mechanism, and clear paths to action.

I like that the designers chose to focus on one thing – my movements by car. It doesn’t overwhelm me and it aspires to do one thing very well: it helps me drive less, and if I have to drive, it helps me account for my driving’s environmental impact. As a model for a simple green tool, Eco2Go has the goods: it raises my awareness, teaches me alternatives, and empowers me.

Taking it even further, a social tab connects me to the broader community of Eco2Go users. There’s a lot of potential for a pretty cool social app that brings all the data to bear, and it looks like the Eco2Go designers are laying the groundwork.

Eco2Go is intended for the Google Android platform and was recently selected as one of the Top 50 finalists for the Google Android Developer Challenge (out of a talented field of 1700+ entrants).

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