A Shared Space Texting Energy Use

Consumption of shared resources in public locations can be understood as being socially invisible. In order to focus attention to the energy consumption in such environments, a design intervention was carried out over a two-week period to deliver electricity usage as collective knowledge. Ambient office lighting was selected as a platform, and the system implemented informed the users of the environment the changes in the resource consumption that the users had control over. The users of the office space were asked to keep track of their experiences and were interviewed at the end of the test period. The decrease in energy consumption was significant, and the intervention managed to increase social visibility of shared energy use. Such an approach of integrating collective resource use and communication suggests further exploration.