Visualizing Energy
Seeing the patterns in our consumption
Data gets a bad rap for being dry and boring. One of my favorite things to do as a designer is to take data and make it visual. I recently got ahold of a device, the TED 5000, that measures the amount of electricity you use in your home, and generates live xml feeds of the kilowatts used. This project was an exploration in taking that data stream and making it visual with shape, color, and animation. Incidentally, it was also an opportunity to try out some of the new vector animation features in html5. I used jQuery to parse the xml, and a great animation framework called RaphaelJS for the graphics.
