thecollectivegoal:

Neighborhood Scoreboards [neighbourhoodscoreboards.com] aims to include some healthy social competition in the monitoring of household energy consumption. Instead of keeping energy monitors private and within the confines of the family living room, Neighborhood Scoreboards exposed the energy consumption of several households on the facade of the respective houses, for everyone to see.

Equipped with only a limited financial budget and the wish to keep a self-imposed requirement to develop a ‘public display’ that is itself sustainable, robust but cheap, it became rapidly clear that an electronic ‘screen’ was not feasible. Instead, the project chose to use a light-weight, weather-resistant board material that was fully recyclable, conveyed the visual aesthetic of chalkboard, and could be regularly updated. Accordingly, a set of 5 boards were mounted on different neighboring houses in a Sydney suburb. Each board featured distinct information graphics to divulge the household’s energy consumption performance, and included several persuasive mechanisms to encourage positive behavior changes. For a period of more than 7 weeks, the researchers went through the painstaking work of manually updating each of these displays, with the help of a set of commercial energy usage monitors, some pens with liquid chalk, and of course, a long, strong ladder.

We live in such a digital age, do you think the physical information displayed to us catches even more honest, sincere attempt at our attention, (compared to if we were to have more digital billboards around us?) . This is a great example of community engagement/involvement I am interested to incorporate into my thesis- addressing/getting peoples attention through physical means. Plus people who don’t have access to smart phones can learn stuff too.