The project is concerned about the future, and I am interested in electriccal energy, especially how to save the energy and what kind of energy that can be reused. So, I started to read Design Futuring, the book of Tony Fry. After read, I found that the best way to sustain energy in the long run was to change everyday practices of people by design, and gave them the real-time information to make them perceived about problems, and did collaboration in order to establish a new social network of people who care more about sustain the energy, thinking and practising themselves as re-directive. For this project, I chose Goldsmiths library as my case study site, which I started to investigate the site by mapping the electric facility in library, estimated number of real using of those facilities per day and calculated amount of energy that has been used in a day and how much of waste energy. After that, I used these information to be critical part of my design.
Relation Mapping
Ideational Drawing + Analysis
Reading Reference
Re-Directive Energy [The Project]
The phantom load or standby mode is the waste energy that consumes electricity while we turn devices off by remote control. The fact that we still plug in the devices all the time and turn it off by remote control, there still has electrical energy running through the device awaiting you to turn it on again, as its name ‘standby mode’.
Even though, this waste energy is very small, but the sum of it can cost your money around 10 percent of the bill per month. And nationally, phantom load converts into billions of pounds and countless amounts of pollution problems in our atmosphere. Also, it affects to natural resources consumption rising dramatically.
So, in this project I use 2 ideas about sustainable electric energy in order to solve the energy problem and save your money.
1. Re-system 2. Design Community
The main idea of re-system is to collect the waste electrical energy – the phantom load – that is produced for nothing in each day in form of ‘re-generated energy’. The waste energy will be stored in a plug of each electrical device. Then at the last half an hour of working hour, this waste energy will be transformed and energize to those devices by itself.
The consequence of this idea can reduce, at least, the total sum of energy consumption of one organization. But, if every organization in the world uses this system, we not only decrease amount of pollution in our atmosphere but also slow down the decaying pace of the world.
Another idea is about co-operation of people. As Tony says the idea of design community is to don’t stick with design manner, don’t be individual, open your minds, listen to other ideas and engage the complexity of design as it shapes us in the same time we create it.
For this idea, I have nothing to do with but create a connective space for people who have concern in specific topic – saving energy - together.
So, at first I use the library computer as space of education, to connect people together. I use real-time information about energy that we consume in each day, the amount of waste energy is produced, how it affects to natural resources and how it impacts to our environment.
This information will show up before we sign in to use the computer and after sign out. That means the information is a neutral staff that depends on the users who can ignore or interested about it. If users feel interested and concerned about it, there is a chat room – the network space - which users can share and exchange information to people who concern in the same interest. It is a real-time connective society who can fix and solve the problems together.
The consequence of this attempt is to create temporary society concerning on energy. Absolutely, the society is fragile but effective. Because in each specific context have their own specific problems, and people who can understand that problems clearly is people who is familiar with that context.
It’s a way that people co-operate to each other in order to confront the problem and solve it together
