Climate change can affect all aspects of our lives, whether in the short term or in the long run, we should take corresponding measures from now on to improve climate change and its adverse effects. In my daily life, I found a very interesting phenomenon, people usually pay more attention to the visible waste and pollution phenomenon, such as water, plastic, car exhaust and so on. People are seeing water flowing away, plastic products being thrown away everywhere, and harmful gases are constantly coming out of the chimney. On the contrary, when resources that cannot be directly observed by the eye are wasted, people don’t care much, especially electricity. Compared with other energy sources, electric phase is a relatively clean energy, but its production and transportation process will also have an impact on the environment. Therefore, I want to design an app that can record the electricity consumption in the home, help people save electricity in a more convenient way, and more importantly, help people form a good habit of saving electricity in their daily life.
I focus on household electricity, because I think that to cultivate good habits of saving resources and improve people’s awareness of environmental protection, we should start from the small things in our daily life. The picture below shows the top ten appliances that people use most energy.
At the same time, in the course of my research, I found a term called “vampire appliances”, which refers to appliances that are still consuming electricity even if they are turned off or not performing their primary functions. In the figure below, I choose the ten most common “vampire appliances” in my home, but there are many more. Therefore, I think that how to cut off the power supply in time when not using these appliances has become the focus of saving household electricity.
The results of my questionnaire show that most people set their appliances in standby mode instead of disconnecting the power plug. About 70 percent of people think the process of turning off the power is too time-consuming, while the remaining 30 percent don’t realize the switching state of the electrical power supply.
With regard to my system map, I listed how electricity is transported from the power station to the home and consumed by two different types of home appliances, regular household appliances and vampire appliances. Wasted electricity is when regular household appliances are not in use and not turned off, and vampire appliances are in standby mode and when unused but not turned off.
Since lighting is usually used as the symbol of saving electricity, thus, I took a picture of a turn on light bulb and use it as the the main object in poster design.
I also made a wireflow for this app, so that we can have a more vivid understanding of the app. The app mainly has four main interfaces. The first is the control interface, where you can control the switches of the entire home appliances. The second is to organize the appliances. After the appliances are powered on through the smart plug, they can be connected with the app by Bluetooth. You can decide which appliances can be controlled by the switches in the control interface. The third screen will show how much power you’ve used this month, and how much less power you’ve used than last month to encourage users. The fourth interface is settings, where you can edit accounts, link WiFi and Bluetooth, turn notifications on or off, and ask for help.
