As you might have figured out the product consists of 3 units: gadget, meter and web. And the basic functionality is that the meter measures your electricity consumption, sends this to the web, the web stores the data and tells the gadget what to display.

The amount of data being transferred from the meter (for the moment a semi buggy simulator written in Java) to the web is quite large and we needed a way to compress this data. Mostly for shorting query times but also we thought that being able to view consumption data for a Wednesday half a year ago with second granularity was a bit unnecessary.

The solution turned out to be storing the raw data for a couple of days, then generalize all aged data points within an hour to an average for that hour. This approach reduces the number of entities in the database approximately with a factor 200! But, it also means that data that has been measured by the meter, and then travelled half the globe are being thrown away. Therefore we might offer the ability to download this data and store it locally. A form of recycle bin you might say. If you’re not interested in storing the data locally, and still want to keep fine granularity, there’s a second way. In the “advanced mode” on the Website you will be able to mark an interval in a diagram and store all data points within this interval, keeping them safe from cleanup algorithms. After giving the interval a note you can share it with your friends.

The goal of this project is to help people reduce their energy consumption. Since we want people to reduce their energy usage, this also includes us and the gadget we want to produce.

As argued before the gadget should act as a reminder and make us aware about our actions. To do that the gadget needs to communicate with the web and the user. This communication is done with different hardware components that all demand some kind of energy source. Tricky! To reduce energy you need a gadget that makes a contribution to the consumption.

After discussing different forms of notifications, light seems like the best alternative. Light can be programmed in all different sorts of forms like text, symbols and rhythm. Light can also be a really low energy component by using LED (Light Emitting Diodes). LED is predicted to be the future of lights in our home (DN article, in Swedish). The traditional (incandescent) light bulb will soon be prohibited in the EU, and today’s low energy lamps has components (like mercury) that are dangerous for the environment. A LED can hold for 45 000 hours (compared to a traditional light bulbs 1000 h and a low energy lamps 8000 h). Don’t miss to read about the further development of LED, the OLED (Organic Light Mitting Diodes).  Put simply – plastic that emits light. Imagine what that can make! Anyway, we want to use this interesting progress for the gadget.

At this moment we are investigating how to program different LED matrices and we’re discussing what information that is preferred to display on the gadget and how. A big idea is to have three matrices in a cube formation. Through sensors the user can change the information on the matrices by flipping, rotating or shaking the cube. Below are some quick sketches of what it could look like. It would be nice to hear what you think!

Lower your energy consumption is like losing weight – knowledge takes you far, but you need reminders to change long time behaviour.

A Power meter gives you possibility to know and measure your energy consumption. Like Lord Kelvin said “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” (Used by Google PowerMeter)

The Swedish company Senea installed thousands of digital power meters in peoples home to test how it would effect their energy consumption. The result showed that it was hard to change people’s behaviours with the meters. Martin Magnusson (Växjö Energy) sad; “It’s not enough to install technology in the house and then wait for it to solve all problems.” Instead one group was also given stimulation to save energy through continued information and competitions. This group had a better success in lowering their energy consumption.

A basic idea in this project is to create an Ecosystem of involvement. The user gets a social and informational connection between Web, Gadget and Meter.

The Gadget is Wireless so it can be placed in an everyday area to remind us. An important thing is that the consumption is Real-time updated so we can connect the level with our actions. Or in other words; the Gadget should react directly to make us aware of our actions.

Apart from creating a useful and fun product, one of the goals of this project is to explore the problems and possibilities of designing an ecosystem of things both physical and digital that all talk to each other. On the digital side, one of the possibilities of reaching a lot of users as well as making use of existing social connections is to build a Facebook app. Looking into this, I was made aware that within the context of the Facebook Walled Garden, there’s almost what you could call an ecosystem in itself of various points where the app could be made a part of the user experience.

Now, there’s nothing really new in this post for anyone who’s even just a little used to using Facebook (how many quiz-app requests have you blocked today?), but in any case you might not have noticed how many options there are for you as a developer to promote your app and for your users to interact with it. Making sensible use of these options is probably a good way to attract more users while avoiding to annoy them.

Hooking into the wall feed & profile page

When you authorize an app, you often get a couple of questions about where your app is allowed to place content. First, you have the profile box placed in the sidebar of your profile page. Sometimes you get asked if the application can publish items in your feed as well, which means that the app can post messages on your own wall. Apart from generated messages from the app itself, these feed items can consist of specially formatted wall posts created via what is called feed forms within your app. These can be posted either to your own profile or that of a friend.

The Publisher box for my favourite football team, extended

Another way of tapping into the user’s feed is to create what is known as a publisher from your app, which means that there is a special button in the regular feed-posting form that allows you to quickly post stuff related to your app usage.

Other parts of the profile page

Apart from the more obvious parts of the profile page listed above, there’s a bunch of places in the users profile where your application might interact with the user(s). You can let the user place an application tab in their profile that lets them interact with the app in a more direct way, similar to the canvas page (more on that in a minute) but “closer to home”.

There’s also a boxes tab that lets you pick and change around what profile boxes are displayed on the profile page. Apart from boxes in the sidebar, there’s also info sections that display information from the app in your personal information on the profile.

Access to the app can also be promoted via application bookmarks at the bottom of the screen, or via the application menu. Finally, you can interact with your applications privacy settings via the general privacy settings for you profile.

The Canvas and app directory

To enable your users to find the app itself, you need an application directory entry where your app is presented, leading to your apps about page with descriptive text and images – this is where you pull the user in and lets them know what your app does, so wording and imagery is important. When the user decides to enable your app, they get to interact with its canvas page, this is where the main full page interface for your app lives. The canvas page and the application tab mentioned previously is where you have the most screen real estate to play with, so if your app needs any bigger graphic user interface or uses a lot of images, forms or text, this is probably where you’ll place it.

Alerts & requests

The final pieces of the puzzle are the little things that sort of pull your users in when they already have enabled your app – or pulls new users in via social connections. Various actions from within your app can let you send requests to other users. I’m thinking this is one of the places where you need to be careful not to spam people. Another way of letting other users know what’s going on with your app is to send notifications from your app to the inbox of a user. In that case, the user must have authorized to receive these via their privacy settings. I’m also pretty sure you can send notifications in the form of a little “blip” in the notification box in the bottom menu of a users page, even though it’s not listed in the developer wiki.

Phew! That’s a lot.

Yup. Even if I’ve come across all these smaller or bigger integration/interaction points as a user, I was actually quite surprised at the sheer amount when I started to put my head around building a Facebook app. There are several places in the developer wiki that list these from various perspectives, and it felt like a good idea to get to know them a little better by summarizing what I found in a blog post. At the time of writing, we (the team working on the electricity meter project) are undecided on whether to put any big functionality into a Facebook app, but knowing what means of reaching and interacting with users are available really helps in establishing boundaries and making the best use of that option.

We invited people from inUse in Malmö to hear their thoughts about the best direction for the project. They marked our gadget and web services ideas. A lot of great notes were made, like were to place the gadget in the home and preferences for social the web interaction. They also gave us nice company for lunch!

Jon, Darja & Hillevi

The marking result

Darja, Mijo, Ylva, Jon & Claes

HISTORY:
In March 2009, Greger said that it’d be nice to create a wireless electricity meter that would help keep track of energy consumtion in a real-time manner that the utility companies so far haven’t really offered. We liked the idea, since it fitted nicely into our interest in playing around with different concepts of arduino-meets-social-media-projects.

During our “hackhelg” in May, Greger got his electricity meter working. Now that the cloud was starting to receive information from our electricity meter, it was about time to do something out of that idea. So today I’m very excited and happy to present “EcoElectricity”, our first real project in Lab1.

AND NOW:
Today I welcomed Emil, Elin and Gustav to the Lab1 facilities in Malmö, Sweden.

The next couple of weeks they’ll be busy

- interviewing people about how they keep track of their electricity consumption

- create personas

- investigate what different directions a physical gadget could take. What would be a interesting tool to have at home, that would help us notice when we consume a lot of electricity?

- answer questions like: What functionality is most effective in motivating us to change our behavior? When are we most receptive to change? What are the easiest ways of lowering one’s electricity consumtion?

We’ll keep you updated on how our work progresses. The goal is to have 20 different households up and running by September 30th. So now we’re getting started…