Why I love and hate the “Wattson”

The Wattson is a design object from DIY Kyoto. It provides a visual indication of the current level of electrical usage in your house and how it compares to your average.

There are a bunch of things that I love about the Wattson. I love the design object, it’s beautiful, as you might expect from a cohort of designers from the RCA. But I find the objective of their mission also beautiful. At GeeKyoto DIYKyoto’s Greta Corke talked about creating awareness without preaching. She said they wanted to help people understand how their electricity usage affects climate change but without judging them. She cited a number of really positive customer stories. My favourite was the little boy who slept with the family Wattson in an attempt to stay up for it turning blue during Earth Hour.

However, there is something that’s been bugging me about the Wattson as well. I hate that the data is so closely coupled to the rendering. The Wattson is essentially two parts. A part that clips onto your mains and transmits data and a part that turns that data into something meaningful. I was unimpressed when Greta answered a question about the feasibility of building on Open Source Wattson with a complete dismissal. I understand that they have put a lot of work in, but I think the Wattson as a design object would stand alone. I think it’s more interesting to decouple the part that transmits the data so that systems could be written around it.

AMEE, for example, generated a lot of discussion. An open standards for transmitting data about electrical usage could allow data to be fed into AMEE. Also if Wattson was more open it would be interesting to see what other measurements could be fed in. For example a wireless multimeter in the form of a plug socket would be awesome. Rather than having a much more horribly sterile looking thing the ability to transmit data to the Wattson, as a design object, would rock.

I guess I’m going to look for a cheap way to beam my electrical data from both mains and plug sockets to a computer and then have some kind of generic ambient data device (homebrew ambient orbs anyone) rather than buy a very specific kind of propriety, if pretty, device.

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