The UNSW Sustainability office wanted to achieve wide-spread behaviour change and reduce the ecological footprint of the university.
With a limited budget and the need to create an effective communication tool for the sustainability unit at UNSW this project was always going to be a challenge. It’s hard to cook a masterpiece with limited raw ingredients so we set to work uncovering the opportunities that might afford an innovative response to the brief.
One of the key project requirements for the team at UNSW was to be transparent about energy consumption in the university and by lucky coincidence the majority of buildings in at UNSW had recently been wired with meters connected to the internet through data feeds. Our team, always keen to make the invisible visible through data visualisation explored through a series of prototypes how we could use the electricity usage data being collected from meter readings around campus. This presented a fantastic opportunity to show how one of the big components of the universities consumption was being used by the major buildings.
We expose this data on the homepage of the sustainability groups web site through a leader board that ranks buildings based on how much they reduced their electricity usage every day. The meter readings are pulled in every hour and website visitors can explore how each building has been using electricity that day or view usage over time right back to when the meters started collecting data.
This not only exposes transparently whether each of the buildings are reducing or increasing their electricity usage, but provides a fantastic platform for behaviour change initiatives we recommended including competitions, real-time experiments and game play.