Time Machine is a device that merges the digital and physical worlds to teach kids about energy saving. It was an eight-day exploration designed during the course Sustainable Tangible Design at CIID. My teammates were Mitsu Shah and Zuyi Huang. I was involved in all phases of the design process, from research to coding.
The brief for this project was “Make an (electronic) product with a positive glocal impact”. To begin zooming in on this very broad brief, we explored the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and decided to tackle Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. We then looked into how this goal can be addressed locally by each individual, and we found that households consume 29% of global energy and contribute to 21% of resulting CO2 emissions. Because of this, we started to look into devices known as "vampires" because they drain power even when they should be turned off. And we learned about a shocking one...
Time Machine teaches kids about energy consumption by putting it into context using something that is part of their life: videogames.
Game consoles consume up to 44% of their total energy while in standby mode. So when Time Machine detects the standby mode, it cues the kid to unplug the video game console. While the console is unplugged, Time Machine periodically rewards the kid with a ball that represents extra minutes of videogame playing time.
When the kid plugs the console again to play, he or she can feed the balls back into Time Machine to redeem the extra playing time, which will be added to the regular daily playtime set by the parents. This will help them learn the mindset of saving now to have more in the future.
Concept. We started the project by doing desk research on SDGs and interviewing people to have a better understanding of the problem. We looked into small consumer behaviors that have a huge impact when added up.
One key insight we discovered during the interviews is that money is the only criteria people know when they talk about energy consumption and energy-saving. They don’t feel motivated enough to do something more sustainably if it will only save them “a few euros”.
Design principles. Based on our research and our values, we defined our design principles. They meant to help us design and evaluate the ideas and concepts we would generate. We wanted to place data about energy consumption into context and nudge people into having an active role in being more sustainable.
Ideation. We ideated on different ways of addressing the design challenge. We then used criteria analysis and our design principles to choose the most promising ideas.
Physical and digital prototyping. We built low-fidelity prototypes to assess how the key interaction would feel and to test how this device would exist in its context. While we started increasing the fidelity of the physical prototyping, we also started building the digital prototype. We planned the best way to build the interaction and how to connect the physical input with the digital output.
In the end, we achieved a key interaction that clearly shows what you receive for the desired behavior and how you can use that output as input again.
When you teach kids how their current actions have an impact in the future, you are creating a positive mindset that will have a lifelong effect on sustainability. That is why Time Machine has two impact curves: one for the savings generated by unplugging the videogame console, and one for the unplugging behavior we are teaching to the kids.
We built a working prototype for the key interaction using Arduino and Processing.
