The wattwise project
Detailed Description
Project Details
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the OPENNESS value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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Openness is really related to our project at this stage, it was always meant to be open sourced from the beginning as a way to promote transparency and honesty about what we have been developing as our AI and Hardware tools begin maturing as the project has progressed. We’ve published as much as we have already on our github page with 2 repositories available right now for people to clone and adapt in any way they want to continue developing the project even further.
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the COLLABORATIVE value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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The project was built on using co-design approaches from the very beginning, bringing in our stakeholders throughout our research to be part of the design process and contribute to both the development of the hardware and software side of the project. We used co-design sessions to gauge how our stakeholders felt about using AI tools for energy management and also invited them to take part in the iteration stages of development of the interaction between them and the AI system. This was instrumental in bringing the project to where it is today, as only through this approach have we built a system where our stakeholders are actually attempting to use the system every day.
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the REGENERATIVE value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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The WattWise project is ultimately designed to help us to keep track of and visualise our embodied energy and carbon consumption habits across 3 main categories of food, transport and the home. By creating tools that do the heavy lifting for people when it comes to the tracking and calculation of consumption, it can suggest more sustainable alternatives to their current habits that don’t affect their quality of life. In doing so it encourages our users to see that small changes in sustainable habits in their own lives can have a really big impact collectively and motivate them to make and push for more regenerative and sustainable practices in their own lives and in their communities as well.
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the ECOSYSTEMIC value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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Naturally there are many caveats to using tools like this to track embodied energy consumption, and not everyone is able to make the same sustainability choices as someone else, and each of these become layered in the social, political and cultural contexts of where the WattWise project can be used, and it is easy for it to get lost in the sea of data that we create around energy consumption. For now though, using the tools we’ve created for this project is a step in what we hope is the right direction when approaching such a complex and multifaceted issue as energy and carbon consumption by attempting to visualise and clarify just one small part of it, and grow and adapt as more people give their input and change it to their specific needs.
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