sustain

Two independent, but similar, designs for tangible ambient displays in the home: the Wilting Flower and the FlowerPod.

Wilting Flower

From TreeHugger:

British designer Carl Smith has created a prototype design of what he’s calling the Wilting Flower – a fake flower in a vase that signals when your home energy use is steadily increasing by wilting (in rainbow-hued LED lights).The Wilting Flower was Carl Smith’s major design project for his university studies in Industrial Design and Technology at Loughborough University. While Wilting Flower does use available technology, Smith told Green Muze that there are no current plans to produce the flower, and user testing revealed that it would need further development before it would be feasible.

FlowerPod

From TreeHugger:

Designed by the Danish Designnord group, the FlowerPod is a semi-transparent screen with an electronic flower display that grows, blooms or wilts according to how smartly the inhabitants of a house or apartment are using heating, cooling, water and electricity. The FlowerPod, which is just now only a concept that Designnord hopes to produce for the 2009 post-Kyoto climate agreement talks to be held in Copenhagen next year, would be wirelessly connected to a home’s meters as well as an individual Internet-based home page that keeps track of average energy use in the city or region where the devise is “planted”. The home page would continually suggest ways to improve energy usage if your flower was wilted, or dying. Designnord said it planned to use a color EPD (electronic paper display) for displaying the FlowerPod’s bloom, which would, it said, only use electricity at certain intervals when getting data from the home page or updating its visual appearance.

As physical artifacts in the home, the design aesthetic must be pleasant and appropriate as well as informative. The tradeoff for this calm visibility is a lack of direct interaction and an inability to “drill-down” into the data, like a touch screen display may offer. In our work with personal ambient displays, we used a flower garden for UbiFit and a tree and an arctic ecosystem for UbiGreen as representations of physical activity and green transit behavior respectively. This abstract feedback was given by changing the background (wallpaper) of the user’s cellphone by semi-automatically sensing activities such as walking, bicycling, running, etc. The user would see the wallpaper each time s/he made a phone call, sent a text message, etc. The wallpaper was also visible when the phone was in lock mode. Thus, the mobile display was a constant yet peripheral reminder about reaching personal fitness and/or green transit goals.

Below, UbiGreen’s two iconic wallpaper, personal ambient displays: