Aggregating Sustainability Metrics
Having commented at length myself, I’ve been keeping an eye on the comments on Russell Davies’ Dark Skies Abuse post. I noticed a comment from Dan Hill suggesting how to discourage users of buildings leaving the lights on:
“Maybe some kind of system that (efficiently) projected giant numbers over the building, indicating their real-time energy use”
Dan expands on this idea in his City of Sound entry, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment. I recommend reading the summary of that post and, if it interests you, going on to watch the video of a talk he gave on the subject back in November. The full post is then easier to digest.
I’ll attempt to capture Dan’s idea as briefly as I can. I hope this doesn’t misrepresent his thoughts:
We have already begun to visual metrics of how sustainably we live. If we were to apply this to as many as aspects of sustainable living as possible, it would be possible to generate an aggregate sustainability score for each of us. This number could be projected over our homes as encouragement to ourselves, and to others, perhaps even fostering good-natured competition in our local communities or and on the web.
As a side-note, I love the idea of using phase-change memory or OLED technology to display the data in street-level windows to increase its accessibility to passers by.
In the video Dan suggests this as a good-natured opt in exercise, but his comment at Russell’s blog raises an interesting question: could the system be made to work at business level and encourage businesses to be more sustainable? Would such a system be compulsory? How could it be made fair?
For it to have a positive effect on business, I think such a system would have to be optional, and gain momentum through public opinion. Ideally sufficient awareness would be raised that companies would feel compelled to opt in. This isn’t straight forward, though: Sainsbury’s traffic light system of dietary nastiness is excellent, but not widely adopted.
The issue of fairness is the one I’m struggling most with:
- If I rent my office accommodation, and it was the landlord that installed inefficient air conditioning, I’m risking a negative public reaction that isn’t necessarily deserved.
- Thousands of people walk past my head office on Trafalgar Square and see my -15 sustainability score, but only a few hundred see the -25 score of my direct competitor, because their HQ is in rural Gloucestershire.
- My competitors are hacking their system. Can we get a regulatory authority in the house? (Similar to the practice of providing a wind turbine as some sustainable badge of honour, despite the fact that it is actually drawing energy).
- We have a relatively poor energy score, but we give up 1000 man-hours of staff time per month for community work - who is to say which should have the greater weighting?
None of which is to say this is a bad idea. It’s a great idea. It’s mind-boggling. It’s even more mind-boggling on a corporate level, but I’m sure it could work. How?
If you’re interested in this stuff, it’s worth keeping an eye on Duncan Wilson’s emtech primer blog.
In the mean time, while we wait for tumblr comments, if you want to continue the discussion email me at james holloway [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll happily publish comments by hand for now.
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JULIAN says: “Just in case you hadn’t seen it, you can get comments for Tumblr from http://disqus.com/ and it’s a piece off piss to add them (http://blog.davidville.com/2007/11/01/tumblr-3/).
“In terms of projecting sustainability metrics, while I really like the stuff Dan talked about, I think it would be pretty difficult to actually persuade more than a small number of businesses or households to go along with a lot of those things not just because of the privacy implications, but the fact that a hell of a lot of people and businesses just don’t care all that much, or want people to know how wasteful they might be.
“Having said that, I think a good first step would be requiring real-time energy meters with internal displays that show more than just basic current usage data, since they’re cheap (£40~ for a home one) and still help people reduce their usage by giving it a number and allowing them to track it. Also, with only a bit more work, they could enable a reasonable amount of the online sharing stuff that Dan talks about, since even the cheap little meter we have has an ethernet port on the bottom.”
