Monday, July 23, 2007

Ambient Information

With the amount of information overload in the form of massive streams of data coming at us in all directions, what if we could provide key information in a less intrusive, but highly visible way. This is the idea behind ambient information ("Psst! You're Wasting Electricity" - Wired, August 2007).

The concept is to place a light that glows different colors in plain sight such that it would indicate when you are using too much electricity or similar information. This is especially useful in situations where it isn't always obvious how much of a scarce resource we are using. This could be applied to bandwidth usage, # of e-mails sent per day, etc. The information could even be made available on the internet on a MySpace page, blog, etc.

Considering I exceed my budget every month, maybe I should link my checking account balance to such a device!

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