Unintended consequences

U

Two stories.

1) A former colleague of mine did a research project for a power company on one of those machines you have in your house that goes red if you are consuming lots of electricity. One participant started boiling water on the gas hob when she was making tea because that way she could keep the thing from going past amber.

2) A different colleague of mine uses an iPhone app which is designed to help you monitor your power consumption to see if his flatmate is home. If it is amber then the flatmate must be home.

Over to you.

About the author

Ivanka

Ivanka Majic works in technology. She was Head of Design for Ubuntu, service managed Digital Marketplace through to beta, was acting director of digital for the Labour Party. She lives and works in Brighton where she works with the council’s digital first team, does a bit of teaching at Sussex University, and works with her husband on projects like restaurantsbrighton.co.uk and the BRAVOs. She has also started a podcast with her friend Michael which you can listen to at grandpodcast.com.

7 comments

  • The first one sounds reasonable – my understanding is that using gas to boil water or cook food is more efficient than using electric heating elements.

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  • I don’t know about where you live, but here, gas *is* way cheaper than electricity per unit of energy, and lots of power stations are gas fired, so what’s wrong with switching from an electric kettle, to a gas one?

  • Hi Ivanka!

    First, sorry for contacting you on the blog but I couldn’t find any contact information for you or anybody from the Canonical design team. I would be really nice to have some kind of “Contact us” link on http://design.canonical.com/

    Actually I wanted to inform you about the GNOME “Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest” to be held in December [1]. I met David Siegel on GUADEC and he told me that your team already did some research on that topic. So we would like to invite someone from your team to the hackfest. We would appreciate if Canonical could be a strong partner for that hackfest to.

    Thanks and regards,
    Johannes

    [1] http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/DevDocTools

  • Hi Johannes,

    I will add something to the blog. In the meantime, if you want to email me ivanka [at] canonical.com and I will put you in touch with the right people. I am on holiday for two weeks as of tomorrow so might not get back to you instantly.

    Ivanka

By Ivanka

About Author

Ivanka

Ivanka Majic works in technology. She was Head of Design for Ubuntu, service managed Digital Marketplace through to beta, was acting director of digital for the Labour Party. She lives and works in Brighton where she works with the council’s digital first team, does a bit of teaching at Sussex University, and works with her husband on projects like restaurantsbrighton.co.uk and the BRAVOs. She has also started a podcast with her friend Michael which you can listen to at grandpodcast.com.

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