Meet Greenbro

Energy is precious and the demand to save it is ubiquitous. A necessary precondition for saving is the knowledge about personal consumption. Products such as smart meters capture that information and convey them to people in form of kilowatt hours and consumption curves. However, from a psychological perspective, we not only want to make information available to people, we also want them to act upon the information. This may require alternative ways of displaying energy consumption: more ambient, more aesthetic, more asking, or more humorous. So far it is unclear, which strategy will work best for initiating energy-saving behaviour? Thus, we engage in experimenting with different forms of what we call "transformational products" – products with the main purpose of changing people.

In that vein, Jan Brechmann and Arne Loermann explored the idea of a cute, autonomous pet-like creature, which calls energy consumption to the attention of its owner and "rats on" the most notorious devices in the household – Meet Greenbro.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wINuzaJihQ4]

Take a look at Jan and Arne's project page at the Dyson Award and vote for them!