consumption indicator by kristina lugonja from croatia

In every home (in the developed part of the world) energy comes with a simple push of a button, without the user ever thinking where did it come from and what sort of impact it has on the environment.
The goal of this project was to overcome the dogma of unchangeable and inexhaustible resources. This is a system of indicators which is designed to visualize the energy consumption which usually isn’t visible (water, gas, electricity). Unlike the conventional indicators of energy consumption, they are placed in visible and accessible places.
Inspiration came from processes in nature in order to acquaint the public with environmental problems in a simple and easy understandable way. Forms of the products, depending on the current amount of energy spent, change their shape to remind us of positive (growth, flowering) and negative changes in the nature (dying, drying, etc.).
You enter information which effect consumption (number of family members, size of the apartment) and the indicator calculates the optimal amount of energy. The indicators are expected to be charged by alternative forms of energy.

There were two phases researched in this project: the one made for contemporary market (which uses the existing technologic achievements and developing technologies) and the second one (which predicts the future development of this project and anticipates the use of new technologies).
The forms of the contemporary phase are sculpture-like and predicted to be made of intelligent materials like shape memory alloys and electro-active polymers. 3 different versions were made for this system.
On the other hand, the forms of the future phase are less tactile, but bear a similar concept: inspiration came from meteoropathy and different weather changes: positive (nice, sunny) and negative (rainy, bad weather), to inform us of our optimal or overdrawn consumption of energy. This phase could be made of different holograms, positive and negative ions which affect our mood etc. in order to create sort of a special atmosphere in a home.