.blog

For those of you who haven’t come across Current Cost before, they are a British company who produce home energy monitors. The aim of these real time monitors is to help people cut their waste energy and therefore reduce their energy bills.

What makes the monitors particularly exciting is, as well as the built in display, they also contain a data port that can be used to transfer bursts of energy usage data, every six seconds, directly to a computer, leading to world of endless possibilities. Exploring these possibilities is the reason I have just ordered a Current Cost CC128 also know as the Envi.

A quick search on Google brings up a number of different people who are already experimenting with energy monitoring devices. The majority of these people seem to be techies at heart and are doing some amazing projects with them, however…

Although the techie side of me will be pleased to have another gadget to play with, my main aim is take a slightly different view point and look at the possibilities from a designer’s point of view.

How can the data from these monitors be made more usable, accessible and appealing to the everyday person, the non-techies of this world?

I have a few ideas up my sleeve, check back soon as my ideas begin to come to life…

Last year, as you can see, I never really got in to this blogging lark…

This year I thought I would ease myself in slowly by micro-blogging on Twitter – www.twitter.com/struggyone

For those who haven’t heard of Twitter, Twitter is website based around the idea of using a 140 characters to answer the question ‘What are you doing?”. You can also follow other ‘Twitterers’ to keep upto date with what they’re doing – these may include friends, industry experts, work colleagues, your favourite celebs or people you find interesting.

On the face of it, I admit, the idea of Twitter does  sounds quite bazaar, and it did take me a while to get my head around it, but since using it it has started to make a lot of sense. There is a lot more to it than simply answering the question ‘What are you doing?”.

I have found Twitter to be a place where you can:

• keep people informed of what you are working on
• build up a network of like minded people
• seek advice from work colleagues and industry experts
• share and find useful, interesting links that are relevant to you
• keep up to date with the latest industry trends and news
• share photos and videos
• market your company or brand
• and a lot me besides – 10 Creative uses of Twitter

As everything is delivered in small 140 character chunks, you can find out a lot of useful, relevant and interesting information very quickly.

I update my twitter account most days, so if you would like a better idea of what I’m up to, head over to -  www.twitter.com/struggyone