Overview

With this Website since it is aimed at home owners that vary from young to old I have been concerntraiting on making the website simple and easy to navigate and understand which I think I have achieved. With the website it should help people be more aware of thier own usage of thier as a household with comparisons on averages and even see what other households are like in differant streets, suburbs and even citys. Once thing that I am going to be thinking from now is if I should put in social networking sites into my site and also from a designers view to make sure the type face keeps consistant.

Communication.

With my discussion page it makes it morelike a social website where you can interact with other people or "power consumers." I made it in a way where it wasnt just where you can go to chat But there are topics where people can post on Important topics and evan have the freedom to make thier own new topic. I got this idea form researching blog websites on power consumption. Then on the side you can go to and online chat to talk to people about your power consumption with ur street whole suburb or city. this helps link into the usage page. I have thought about linking in facebook with this as it is a very populat social networking site and could help people to chat with other people with more ease but Facebook is more individual and this is for households so I wasnt sure whether or not to include it into it.

creating news page.

I thought after doing some research on energy websites that my website shoud have a news tab on it. I think it would be good for people to know what is happining in general to do with power in both New Zealand and around the world. for example with the news page of energy.gov i was looking at on Victoria Uni winning the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. Also with having global and New Zealand news i aded in a search bar to search for specific news and added tabs to last week week or month.

Usage page improvements.

With my usage page I decided to change the look of it and keep it simple by taking away the bar graph and replacing it with butttons that represent whether the house in the street is low moderate or high usage. I then wanted to take it a step further by butting history into it and also puting a ranking sytem in so you can see what rank you are in your street etc. (Your usage is averaged depending on how big your house is, family members eg)

experimenting with morphing background.

For the start of my website I wanted to illistrate the background changing from High usage to low usage. My first attempt didnt work so well because it was pretty much just ripping itsef apart and putting itself back together as the other background which didnt work for me at all because I wanted a smooth transformation. I then started trying to re make the background in flash by morphing objects but because I combined several shapes to make one of the curves I wanted when I went to transform it it broke itself apart into the all the original shapes evan tho i combined them and I didnt know how to get around this so I then proceeded to experimenting with fading and after a lot of trials I got it to what I wanted so there was a smooth transistion between the high, moderate and low usage pages.

Experiments on High Usage background.

I started by changing the background toblack and white experimenting with how dark the background is and then morphed the background in way I liked to get a more disorganized feel to it. After doing this I felt that it needed more so I added some grunge to it which got the desired effect that I was looking for and I think it fits really well.

Tips page

The tips page was designed to make it so straight from the home page you can navigate to this page to help you conserve energy depending on how high or low your power usage is.

New home button

This is the new button for my home page and the new layout/look aswel. the button looks more like a button and I think it is more aesthetic. I decided to make the home page simple with just one button so as soon as you click onto the site you can click the low usage button which will take you straight to a tips page.

Written Description.

I plan to make an energy usage website that collects data from energy companies to the website to get the information needed to make calculations on what consumption of the energy of a house hold is and how they compare in their street, suburb or even city. Also the number of people and size of the house etc is put into consideration for the averages. There will be a percentage bar that lets you know what percentage you fall into of the highest average users of house hold energy to the highest. With this everyone will be more aware of their energy consumption because they will be comparing it against others. Not only is the site for showing your usage but also providing tips on how to save power and the tips that come up on the web page depend on how high or low your usage is so for example if you were using a lot of energy for your house then major ways to reduce your energy consumption. The social networking aspect will be helpful as well because it will encourage people to instead of ignoring their usage to talk about it with others via chat and have discussion boards on ways on how to save energy. 

I plan on doing this by designing the website on Photoshop, and the technology being used are computers or the internet. Also the user group I am targeting is going to be for home owners. With the visual aesthetics of the web page I am going to make it very simple and easy to navigate considering home owners are a very broad target of people.

Prototype.

This is the prototype for my idea and it illustrates my main ideas of how the home page changes and how there will be bar saying what your average house hold energy consumption is compared to your street suburb or city. It is just the raw aspects of the website at the moment and is very basic but shows that's what I plan to do.

Starting ideas and development.

I wanted to make the home page very personal to every user so if your average usage towards everyone else is very high a high usage alert will be on your home page along with tips on advice in how to cut down on energy usage a lot. At first I had red for when your usage was high but instead of going from red and green I'm going to try make it so it starts green when its low and it loses more and more of the colour in the home page the more you use and instead of having just high usage and low I'm thinking of putting in a moderate as well.

research.

This is an example of an energy usage website that I found. although there is a "community" page it isn't very interactive and doesn't give a lot of information and help that is straight forward enough for everyone.

Brainstorm.

From my brainstorm I decided to expand on my online idea.

Main ways we get our energy.

Hydroelectricity is the term referring to electricity generated by hydropower; the production of electrical power through the use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water. It is the most widely used form of renewable energy. Once a hydroelectric complex is constructed, the project produces no direct waste, and has a considerably lower output level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) than fossil fuel powered energy plants. Worldwide, an installed capacity of 777 GWe supplied 2998 TWh of hydroelectricity in 2006. This was approximately 20% of the world's electricity, and accounted for about 88% of electricity from renewable sources

 Nuclear power is the use of sustained nuclear fission to generate heat and do useful work. Nuclear power plants provide about 6% of the world's energy and 13–14% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for about 50% of nuclear generated electricity. In 2007, the IAEA reported there were 439 nuclear power reactors in operation in the world operating in 31 countries^. Also, more than 150 naval vessels using nuclear propulsion have been built.

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electricity, windmills for mechanical power, windpumps for water pumping or drainage, or sails to propel ships.
Wind power, as an alternative to fossil fuels, is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation. A large wind farm may consist of several hundred individual wind turbines which are connected to the electric power transmission network. At the end of 2010, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 197 gigawatts (GW). Energy production was 430 TWh, which is about 2.5% of worldwide electricity usage. Several countries have achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration, such as 21% of stationary electricity production in Denmark, 18% in Portugal, 16% in Spain, 14% in Ireland and 9% in Germany in 2010. As of 2011, 83 countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity

Research. stats.

Found in an article online talking about the usage of internet.

"As internet use grows, the power used to run computer servers is concerning US and European1 policymakers. A recent survey estimates that electricity consumption by data centers, which house servers, doubled between 2000 and 2005. They accounted for 1 per cent of global electricity usage in 2005. Western European consumption accounted for a quarter of this figure and was growing slightly faster than the global average."

Link:

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/136na1.pdf

Research. (advancement in energy reading technology)

Researching how we have gone from dials to LCD screens and then further advancing them but what I found is that even  with the more modern and advanced power meters for houses its not really telling you anything significant to get a good understanding and there is nothing to compare it agaisnt to know if you are using a lot or very little energy.

Final 5 photos.

Final write up.

Hughes Chris Package Delight

With my interaction I am looking at packaging and how we interact with packaging that we come across every day. My idea is very simple and looks into one aspect of interaction whichis how we open and  close packaging and the different variations we can get. Also that not only are weusing our sense  of touch but also a sense of sound. I decided in the end to use different variationsof sandpaper rather than different materials like glass, cloth etc after experimenting with  materials like these and finding they don’t quite get the subtle differenc es I was looking for and it became all too complex to use. With my interaction It is an box with 3different types of sandpaper that go from smooth with rough from the matt black box to the gloss box. Instruction -First take the matt black box and open and close it. (try not to fully close it as it may be a bit hard  to re-open) -Turn the lid around so you have a different combination of friction against the lid. -Take the gloss black box and open and close it and then do the same as the second step.

Origami.

In a first attempt at making a box I looked at origami I box's and this is what I ended up making. (This is not the exact box I made mine got crushed so couldn't take a photo of it.)

Investigation.

While investigating packaging and different types, shapes, sizes etc of box's I came across the iPhone 4 case which caught my eye by how elegant it looks and I've opened one of these box's before and what I found interesting about it was that a sort of vacuum effect was made when lifting and closing the lid due to how precise the box was which was interesting. I think I am going to try base my box on how the iPhone 4 box was made. 

StoryBoard

Project 1 Part A

Description and Instructions.

The purpose of this interaction is to see how different textures sound, feel and move when goes against the lid of the box and which relates a lot to packaging because with this you can test out which textures the box could be made out of that would be more appealing for the user.  The user has total control over this as they will be able to pick out and put the textured tabs together as they want and from there it’s their option of what they want to do e.g. letting the weight of the lid close the box or pushing the lid down themselves.

With my interaction I have a box that has several different tabs on it which goes into the different slots on the outside of the box  and each one of the tabs has a different texture to it e.g. some with be rough some will be smooth. These tabs can be taking out of the slots and rearranged in any order that the user wants. 

1. Take the tabs and put them in the tab slots in any order.

2. Put the lid on the box.

3. Repeat step one but in a different order.

Simple…