permaculture

["Nicholas Roberts" <nicholas@themediasociety.org>]

December 07, 2008 City Eco Lab: neighbourhood energy dashboard

[image: dashboard-magalie.png]

In the central space of City Eco Lab, a variety of live projects were on
show that dealt with energy, water and mobility. Two key questions emerged:
What variables make a neighbourhood sustainable, or not? And how do you
measure them?

Magalie Restalo, a designer from St Etienne, presented the prototype of an
energy and resource flows dashboard that would indicate the impacts of
different kinds of interventions: feeding the quartier's citizens more from
allotment gardens; increasing the flow of foods through the
community-supported agriculture system AMAP; and the use of bicycle based
couriers such as Les Coursiers Verts.

The animation is not real-time, but it is based on reasonably hard numbers.
The idea is to show citizens of the neighbourhood how much difference each
of the possible changes would make.

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I've
been trying to commission dashboards for cities and regions for years now -
but until the St Etienne project, they never left the drawingboard. (For
Dott 07 in North East England, for example, I commissioned a project
called Vital
Signs <http://www.dott07.com/go/landscape> which morphed into an quite
different art project to the one I'd anticipated).

-- 
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor