Think Tank

According to the US Green Building Council (USGBC), commercial and residential buildings use 62.5 percent of total US electricity, and building activity in the US contributes over 30 percent of US greenhouse gases. While most people know that incandescent light bulbs in our homes are inefficient compared with compact fluorescents, or that it’s a waste of energy to pump air-conditioning through an empty office building, the raw facts—how much energy we’re using, or money we’re wasting—are not accessible, and neither is there much incentive to change. Exactly how much are we reducing carbon dioxide emissions by biking to work or turning off our computers at night? What is the true cost of leaving the lights and heating on in an empty building? Because of the general lack of an infrastructure to support and encourage environmental stewardship, a number of artists, designers and entrepreneurs have begun projects that aim to bridge the communication chasm between buildings and their inhabitants.

The Building Dashboard

Figure 1: A screenshot of the Building Dashboard by Lucid Design.

A new device called the Building Dashboard provides a centralized interface to the environmental performance of a building, displaying water use, energy use, specifics such as the amount of electricity generated by solar roof panels, or the amount of water derived from rainwater systems and comparative data such as electricity use per floor or per building. The idea for the device came out of Oberlin College, where three environmental studies students were experiencing certain frustrations from working inside the school’s environmental studies building—designed by William McDonough, the noted green architect. “It’s a building that teaches, but there were shortfalls in terms of its educational component,” says Michael Murray, one of the product’s developers. “It was very difficult for the average person to see what was happening with its green features. You couldn’t see the solar panels operating, you didn’t know how to optimize energy usage, you couldn’t see how much water was being used to water the landscape and it was difficult for people to see how the waste water system worked.” Murray and his two colleagues began experimenting off-the-shelf technologies to monitor the energy and water flows, and, after graduating, rebuilt the whole system from scratch, founding the Oakland-based company Lucid Design Group in 2004. “We’re finding neat ways to show data,” says Murray, “so that even if you don’t have an engineering degree you can figure out what’s happening.”

Figure 2: A screenshot of the Building Dashboard by Lucid Design.

To date, the market for Building Dashboard has been limited to mostly educational institutions, which have a vested interest in making the environmental performance of a building transparent, and don’t baulk at the product’s baseline price tag of $15,000. However, a Santa Monica-based housing developer recently broke the mold and commissioned a custom monitoring and display system from Lucid for its model home, which earned the first ever USGBC award for homes, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum rating. Another housing developer in Atlanta, Georgia is exploring the idea of putting Building Dashboard in its high end “Ecomanor” homes; the developer is particularly focused on using the system to display how quickly energy savings will pay off the capital cost of installing solar panels. New buildings increasingly include networked maintenance sensors in their construction, says Murray, making it a smaller step to add on a hardware and software system like Building Dashboard to store and array the data. “People are realizing there’s a lot of cost-savings potential, which is making it more attractive to store the data. The question is how to display it.”

The Wattson

Figure 3: The Wattson, a home-energy monitor by DIY Kyoto.

For those of us who cannot afford to live in LEED Platinum green luxury homes, the currently available energy monitoring systems are limited to devices like the popular Kil-a-watt, made by P3 International, which plugs into wall outlets to record the electricity use of appliances. [1] A more eye-pleasing and useful alternative is the Wattson, created by three former Royal College of Art industrial and interactive design students operating under the company name DIY Kyoto and sold in the UK since this summer. [2] Wattson consists of two parts: a box wired into the power supply of a house that transmits data wirelessly to a C-shaped tabletop “mood light” which displays current electricity consumption using a digital readout and colored light scheme which shifts according to energy load. A USB hook-up connects the device to a computer to reveal a history of data use of several months, providing the means for an all-out assault on energy use and comparison via the Web with other Wattson users.

Shifting our frame of reference

Figure 4: An animation by artist Tiffany Holmes showing relatively low levels of energy use.

All these devices, however, assume that people are actually interested in monitoring their energy consumption. This summer in the lobby of a new National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) building a public art project will aim to get building residents “invested in their carbon footprint” according to its creator, new-media artist Tiffany Holmes. The project, titled 7000 Oaks and Counting, will feature a series of screened animations that reflect the building’s energy loads and respond to the environmental impact of its occupants’ behavior. “People have the mistaken idea that because they’re at work and because the lights go on and off automatically that they’re kind of trapped and there’s nothing they can do,” says Holmes. “Whereas in fact they can choose whether they walk or drive to work, and choose whether to turn off the power strip in their office. The work is about trying to visualize this hidden information which, at NCSA, is already available on the building.”

Figure 5: An animation by artist Tiffany Holmes showing higher levels of energy use.

Holmes’ main tactic is to attempt to shift the building residents’ frame of reference by allowing their activities to affect the data visualizations on a kiosk in the lobby and on an accompanying website. A spinning tree motif recalling electric meter dials reflects the building’s real-time carbon footprint, calculated using Holmes’ software from aggregate data taken from the NCSA building’s monitoring system. As energy use in the building increases, the tree motif expands and gradually becomes adorned with man-made objects: spinning airplanes, light bulbs, tractors, toaster and power strips, until the trees can no longer be seen and the background turns from black to yellow to red. To convey exactly how much carbon dioxide is generated by the building, another screen relays some tangible statistics. Roughly seven trees must be planted to absorb a pound of carbon dioxide, according to Holmes, so if the building is generating 130 pounds of carbon, the graphic advises occupants that 910 trees need to be planted that day. Rather than provide tree-and-shovel purchasing information, the system allows NCSA employees to offset the carbon footprint by taking certain actions, such as biking to work or agreeing to wash clothes in cold water. These actions are logged on the project website. Purchasing a hybrid car, for instance, would immediately offset the 910 trees and turn the angry yellow spinning motif of wastebaskets, light bulbs and printers into a soothing green “carbon neutral” disk.

The conceptual roots of the project lie in the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and Betty Beaumont were among the first artists to attempt to generate environmental awareness through installations and performances that set out to break down the barrier between high art and everyday life. In 1971, Beuys ran naked (wearing his hat, of course) through a bog in a performance titled Eine Aktion im Moor (Bog Action) to draw attention to the connection between our bodies and non-romanticized ecosystems such as wetlands. The same year, a group of Canadian activists embarked on an ocean-bound protest against US nuclear testing on the island of Amchitka, which is now a bird sanctuary: the activists subsequently formed Greenpeace. [3] Beuys’s 1982 project 7,000 Oaks provided the title and inspiration for Holmes’s current installation. At the opening of the Documenta 7 art festival in Kassel, Germany in1982, Beuys had planted an oak tree, declaring that in five years’ time he would plant the 7,000th of these trees, each accompanied by a four-foot high basalt column. He died in 1986, but the project was a remarkable success, with contributions (each tree cost its purchaser $210) coming in from around the world, and Beuys’ son planted the 7,000th oak at Documenta 8 in 1987. The trees were meant as a protest against deforestation and acid rain, and, at the same time performed the accumulative job of urban renewal, giving expression to what Beuys called “super time” which he measured in terms of the lifespan of an oak, around 800 years.[4] “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time,” he said. “The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture…” [5]

The Jeremijenko’s One Tree project

Figure 6: Map from Natalie Jeremijenko’s One Tree project.

Another descendent of 7,000 Oaks is Natalie Jeremijenko’s OneTrees project, in which the artist, teaming up with two San Francisco-based non-profit groups, planted cloned pairs of Paradox trees around the Bay Area in 2003 to register the different social and environmental conditions in which they are growing. In this instance, the trees played the part of sensors, or as Jeremijenko put it, “tangible interfaces” that visualized the less tangible data of pollution, groundwater conditions and human maintenance while also poking holes in the popular conception of genetic clones as mirror images.

The beauty of Beuys’ project—and to an extent, Jeremijenko’s homage—is that the trees functioned as “ecological signs” (in Beuys’s words), without presenting a finger-wagging admonishment to goad people into action. Tree planting became an affirming activity, as opposed to, say, a documentary film with Armageddon-like scenarios of impending ecological disaster. The fine line between inspiration and moral admonishment is difficult to tread, particularly in the recent wave of eco-aware projects. American artist Chris Jordan’s large-scale images of human consumption in his current photographic series Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait look at US culture through the lens of statistics, rendering factoids such as “the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours”–11,000—in a dazzling miasma of jet trails, or “two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes” as a kind of neo-Pointillist composition. Yet the images sit awkwardly between lamenting and celebrating our colossal capacity for wastefulness and for guzzling the earth’s fossil fuels.

The Static! Increasing Energy Awareness project

Figure 7: The Power-Cord from the Static! Increasing Energy Awareness project.

Other projects emanate from the Interactive Institute’s research project Static! Increasing Energy Awareness, in Gotenberg, Sweden: the “power aware cord,” for example, weaves lighting into a standard power-cord so that as electricity flows, it is represented by glowing pulses, and the flow and intensity of light. The Static “flower light” reflects household energy consumption by changing its shape and “blooming” when the electricity has been used frugally.

Figure 8: The Flower Lamp project from the Static! Increasing Energy Awareness project.

Ultimately, the difference between Jordan’s series and other projects discussed here is one of scale. Where Running the Numbers serves to prod or overwhelm the viewer by presenting epic images representing general statistics, the projects by Holmes, DIY Kyoto, the Static designers, Beuys and Lucid provide local information that allows for local action. Holmes discovered the importance of allowing people a chance to act in a prior project on water quality, Floating Point. During a residency at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 2004, Holmes created 18 animations that used custom software to visualize water quality data, revealing in water samples the levels of dissolved oxygen, dissolved solids, nitrate concentations, temperature, and turbidity. High levels of dissolved solids, for example, which often indicate the presence of substances like sewage in water, were indicated with bright, synthetic colors, while circles indicated high oxygen levels. After presenting the project to an audience, Holmes agreed with a scientist’s critique that it would be more interesting to focus on an area that viewers of the visualization could actually control through immediate individual or collective action.

Rethinking Waste

An ongoing project at the University of Minnesota highlights that local change is a more effective and achievable goal than hand wringing for general behavior change. At the end of Spring this year, architecture student Sarah Wolbert mounted an exhibition titled “Rethinking Waste” aimed at provoking creative solutions to reducing the waste produced by the University’s College of Design in its architecture building, Rapson Hall. “I find that many sustainable informational displays focus on detailing the issue, but not proposing tangible individual solutions,” notes Wolbert, whose project concluded with a series of immediate recommendations for the department. The exhibition greeted visitors with a series of installations of repurposed trash and a banner declaring “Congratulations! We made 1100 lbs of waste in 3 days!” Data was derived from a waste audit of Rapson Hall conducted by Virajita Singh, a researcher in the University’s Center of Sustainable Building Research. “Most people were shocked that it was only three days,” says Singh.

According to the audit, which took place over two separate weeks, 30 percent of the waste thrown away during the first week (a quiet time in the semester) could have been recycled using the Twin Cities’ existing paper, glass and metal recycling systems. In the second week, which fell during finals, that figure rose to 48 percent. Singh speculates that a harried student is less inclined think about whether an item of trash can be recycled; a more fixable problem is that the lids designating which trash cans are destined for landfill and which are for recycling plants often get mixed up or removed as the students move the bins nearer their desks. Among the proposed solutions are fixing the lids to the bins and reinstating a “green room” where discarded but perfectly usable materials can be left for others to pick up. Singh intends to follow the waste audit by running the building through the LEED checklist. She anticipates that it will bring to light inconsistencies such as the University’s blanket irrigation policy, which sprinkled equally the water-sucking lawn and the drought resistant prairie grasses planted outside Rapson, regardless of species. Inaccessible light switches and the absence of automatic sensors (which were value engineered out of the building) might also be revisited.

Inevitably, local efforts to initiate change encounter institutional rigidity; Beuys’ trees project earned howls of protest from Kassel citizens, including drivers who feared losing their parking spots and others who thought the trees would one day interfere with power lines. Holmes’ project, meanwhile, attracted grumblings from NCSA officials who felt the organization was being unfairly targeted for its high electricity use. As Holmes concludes, if effective energy efficiency legislation were in place, there would be no need for projects like hers; all would be automated or performed by citizens without much debate. In the absence of enlightened government, however, visualizing consumption to get people talking is a potentially effective response. Adds Holmes, “Anything that provokes any kind of controversy or uncomfortable feeling is doing something. I would rather have that than have people ignore it.”

Where to go from here

For further investigation, check out the following resources:

1. www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/kill_a_watt_electric_usage_monitor_review
2. www.diykyoto.com
3. See Tiffany Holmes, “Environmental Awareness through Eco-visualization: Combining Art and Technology to Promote Sustainability” in Reconstruction 6.3.
   http://reconstruction.eserver.org/063/holmes.shtml
4. Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) 148
5. Interview with Richard Demarco, 1982, in Carin Kuoni, ed. Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990) 111

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