What if the art hanging on your wall could also function as your thermostat, or tell you how much electricity your water heater was using? Via Space10
Data tracking tends to be expressed through numbers and graphs, which can be hard to relate to. While people are not necessarily motivated by numbers in the long run, art can move us to think and act differently. For this reason, Victoria Hammel and Gunes Kantaroglu from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) developed smART, an interactive art piece that presents our energy use at home in a new way and creates a more captive audience than graphs or charts would.
Victoria Hammel and Gunes Kantaroglu set out to find a way to motivate people to use less heat and water at home. After interviewing homeowners and smart home experts, they decided that data about a home’s resource consumption needed to become more meaningful and intuitive. “We envision that the home will be a place where people try to be less wasteful as the world’s natural resources become more strained. So we need solutions for presenting big data in an understandable way that is neither intrusive, nor creates cognitive overload”, says Hammel.
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