Ever wonder how the buildings around you are using resources? The Berkeley Campus Dashboard Project is a student run ini?a?ve designed to gather informa?on on electricity, water, and steam usage from campus and share it with everyone in both raw and interpreted forms through data driven web tools and on site installa?ons. Electricity consump?on decisions are both personal and collec?ve, so we’ve been studying the places and devices you use every day as well as the buildings on campus where energy is used on your behalf. We hope that the informa?on provided here encourages you to ponder how you and this university can work to reduce the impacts of our collec?ve consump?on. You have immediate control over some of the electricity use in your life, for example powering down your computer at night. You can also influence the collec?ve uses, for instance by asking a facili?es manager what building systems can be scaled back at night or how you can support more efficient building control. How else can we all save resources? We invite you to share your ideas and keep up with our progress here and online at h"p://dashboard.berkeley.edu and keep an eye out for other Campus Dashboard installa?ons around campus! This display was an outgrowth of the project designed to help visitors understand electricity consump?on in the Free Speech Cafe in the context of their lives and ac?vi?es throughout the rest of campus.
Sample of informa?onal signage designed to help visitors interpret café energy use
Contempla?ng the live LED stacked bar display of café electricity use
Signage helping visitors understand the amount of energy found in a kWh, the ubiquitous measure of electrical energy.
The “Power to the Penguin” game was designed to give players the experience of genera?ng power sufficient to run familiar electrical devices. Players first guess the power demand and then crank away at the correct level. The resul?ng learning is both visceral and cerebral!