Wattson
July 4th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
The most pleasant surprise about building ecolocal has been the interest I’ve taken in finding ‘green’ news stories and watching the discussions take place within the site. To that end, we quickly setup a ‘Featured Articles’ panel on the home page and made sure that the most popular news stories received the attention they were due.
Personally, too, I’ve been impressed by how timely ecolocal is. Naturally I’m biased, but having taken my head out of the code-pit and back into the real world, it’s clear that there are a greater number of eco news stories around today then there were, say, last year. Again, as a developer I thought that I’d have to change gears to appreciate the community building up around ecolocal, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. If there’s one thing that oft-used phrase Web 2.0 is doing, it’s re-invigorating the Internet as a source of news and opinion. With that, too, comes investment, and there are an increasing number of tech start-ups whose purpose is no longer to be the best online PIM, photo book or dating service, but to be the best alternative fuel, to promote the easiest sustainable lifestyle or to be the first to harness alternative energy sources affordably.
What I’m getting at, is that there is still tech news around the ecolocal area of influence that I’m happy to find and start a discussion on. Chiefly, the wattson is the kind of gadget that I’d expect to be reading about on slashdot, digg or, at a stretch, techcrunch – websites that normally cater to the cutting edge of tech news. However, I didn’t find out about the wattson in any of those places. I found out about it via the Observer newspaper, which has, for the last few weeks, been consistently and prominently running green and eco-friendly stories.
The wattson is a neat looking device that looks like it would sit comfortably next to your iPod on a coffee table. It’s a blend of clean lives, white plastic and tasteful wood with an ambient, glowing displaying. Its job is to display the electricity being used by your house, in realtime. There is none of the clutter that could turn this kind of device into an eye-sore, it features a simple readout that ticks plenty of ubicomp checkboxes. And just like the Ambient Orb, the weather predicting toaster or the Nabaztag, the wattson is an Internet-enabled device that adds a social element to it’s sustainable ethics.
I love this kind of eco-awareness propogation. There are hundreds of simple ways in which we can all reduce our impact on the planet and devices like the wattson serve to make it clear, fun and easy to limit the damage we do. The wattson is education, I can see myself installing one and turning on and off appliances until I find a balance around the home which provides me with the requirement I need (fridge on, food not spoiling, heating still fuctioning) but makes me realise, in clear numbers, the leaky, electrical wastage caused by TVs and game consoles being on standby. There’s even an aspect of play involved, too, given that the wattson displays just a number, it would be hard not to treat it like a score and experiment with devices throughout the house to find out what are the best and worst at consuming electricity.
This is low-level, educational, fun and exactly the kind of thing that I want ecolocal to be throwing up periodically. With its internet connection you can use it to compare usage with national benchmarks and other users, or setup sub-communities to make those comparisons more worthwhile. The display can switch between Watts or Pounds per Year, making it even more ‘realtime’ in the sense that you can get a clear idea of how much your current electricity usage is going to cost you. Calculate the difference a single device makes by watching the Watts figure change when you turn it on and you’ll be able to work out how much that device will cost you over the course of a year:
The display is even ‘nonverbal’ switching from red to green depending on your electricity usage whilst the device itself can be connected to a PC to sync its log files, so that you can plot a graph of electricity usage. Simply put, want one.
Update: Here’s a cheaper, but less sexy version of the same thing. It all helps in our attempts to build a green home.
2 comments
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Anonymous replied:
The Wattson…
How the Wattson combines iPod style, ubicomp and educational, sustainable ethics in one sleek coffee-table device….
July 5th, 2006 at 9:47 am. Permalink.
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Passive City Blogging at Suttree - Real Artists Ship replied:
[...] However, I thought that when the site went live, my involvement with it would reduce to pure administration and mainteanace. Last month, though, I discovered the Wattson and posted it to ecolocal. Since then, I’ve found a number of ‘green’ stories that are relevant to ecolocal and have kept me involved with the site as a user, not a developer. I’m finding more and more stories cropping up about green technology companies, like this one about how green tech will spawn the next Google. [...]
July 31st, 2006 at 7:36 am. Permalink.