The Energy Diary - Learning Energy Systems

This innovative project will use the 'Energy Diary' app co-designed with two schools involved in the earlier 'Learning Energy Systems' project, which was focused on energy awareness and reduction. Schools currently use 50% more electricity than predicted, and it is recognised that people using the buildings contribute significantly to this consistent over use of energy. The council are seeking pathways to reducing energy use in their building estate, through education and behaviour change. This project will enable pupils and teachers to experiment with use of the 'Energy Diary', as a way for visualising energy use. In addition, a web dashboard will be created to provide overall visualisation of energy use from all participants in the project. This was also prototyped as part of Learning Energy Systems. This can be designed to record energy use in classrooms or areas within the school, mapped against the school timetables, giving all involved a better understanding of how energy is used around them and ways in which they could reduce theirs and the school's energy consumption.

Funding will allow 'Energy Diary' app and dashboard to be developed and tested within a City of Edinburgh Council school. The iterative design process will enable the school to crowdsource energy data from within their own building. This will allow a more accurate picture of how and where energy is used throughout the school week. This provides opportunities for energy reduction through behaviour change in the classroom. It also provides opportunities for working with real world data in the curricula subjects of maths, statistics, geography and science. Interaction design will use the data visualisation aspect of the project to explore broader aspects of the curriculum, eg art, ethics.