Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Beauty Changes Behavior


Every year, Time Magazine collects some of the best inventions from all over the world. This year, the Flower Lamp from Sweden's Interactive Institute's design research project STATIC!, is one of the nominees.

The Flower Lamp is one of 11 designs in which a research team have explored how design can encourage people to use less energy in their home. The Flower Lamp is actually a display for ones electricity consumption. It doesn’t show how many watts you’re consuming right now, but rather the overall trend in your consumption. If the household has a decreasing trend of electricity use, the Flower lamp rewards you by slowly opening up to "bloom". If, on the other hand, use is increasing, the lamp folds its petals together. Thus the lamp, in terms of both light and form, is reflecting the cycles of local energy use in a subtle and poetic way that makes smaller sacrifices of heat and warm water, worthwhile. In order to make the lamp more beautiful, a change of behavior is needed.

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