Rough Proposal for Final Infographic Projects
April 20th, 2010
When it comes to visualizing personal energy use, most people have little more than a spinning meter outside their home and monthly utility bills to go from. Needless to say, there is an opportunity for creating a more compelling way to visualize personal energy use.
Looking at both methods, the spinning meter and the utility bill, we can see pros and cons of each:
Spinning Meter
pros: real time, movement conveys action
cons: no historical context, only current data
Utility Bill
pros: basic historical data, some sense of story telling
cons: static, only basic summary lacking info about when surges of usage happened.
1 + 1 = 3
My goal is to combine the best of both methods: the real time movement of the meter with the historical context of the utility bill, and then go above and beyond to create a visualization that communicates more information faster than either of the current methods allow.
The data set will be pulled from the same source that drove my redesign project: the TED 5000 device I have installed in my apartment. It generates minute-by-minute, hourly, and daily xml feeds that my site will use to generate the visuals.
I want to use animation to tell the story “live” (or as close to live as I can get within technological limits). Something along the lines of an infographic screensaver is what I’m envisioning.
