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Message Vision Home Energy-Management System Tendril is a leading cleantech energy-management firm that strives to bring widespread insight and control to the smart grid. The Boulder, Colorado-based start-up’s core technology offers an open, secure, and scalable means for enabling utilities and their customers to monitor and share data. The company, looking for the best way to engage consumers in managing their residential energy use, partnered with IDEO to develop a “product ecosystem” strategy. Their partnership led to the design of a device that helps households visualize, monitor, and control energy consumption, and an accompanying web portal. Tendril chose IDEO for its expertise in bringing design thinking to complex challenges and for its experience in the energy industry, ranging from developing an efficiency strategy for the U.S. Department of Energy to working with cleantech and utility companies. The design team took a systems approach to home-energy management: It considered how consumers interact with their home environments, how people would like energy providers to communicate with them, and how best to promote household engagement and behavioral change. Simply put, the team found that most consumers aren’t that engaged with their energy use. Energy is something that happens inherently in the background and is only noticed when bills are extraordinarily high or blackouts suddenly make it unavailable. Because energy does not command attention, IDEO’s challenge was to reframe energy and visualize its use in a meaningful way. The team accomplished this by developing and adhering to a set of four simple design principles: anchor the system in a familiar household object, provide usage data without judgment, offer continuous reinforcement, and respectfully help people learn about their own power consumption. Extensive user tests ensured that the system — or any single device — fit into the mental models of mainstream users, not just sophisticated “greens” or early adopters. Identifying and designing for the appropriate time and place for different levels of interactions was one of the key insights and design challenges. To address this, the device and web portal interaction designs were tied together. The device is the main point of engagement for quick set-up, information and alerts at-a-glance, but for deeper interactions, like creating and managing a customized energy-use plan, users go through the web portal. The final Tendril Vision design, unveiled in March 2010, is anchored in a household appliance more akin to a home furnishing than a consumer-electronics device. The Vision allows consumers to link directly to their utility to get meaningful, real-time data about their energy use and its cost. Vision encourages everyday interaction by displaying ambient information and providing the tools to respond. It displays upcoming, real-time events, so people can plan accordingly: For example, after noting a visual cue for high energy demand during a peak pricing period, a homeowner may decide to wait to run the dishwasher, turn down the thermostat, or even leave the house to run errands in order to save money during that time. Tendril Vision helps people “take an active role in how much energy they use, change their behavior, and see immediate results,” says CEO Adrian Tuck. On average, he adds, households can reduce their consumption by 10 to 15 percent. http://www.ideo.com/work/vision-home-energy-management-system