The conference and workshop will be led by Ben Cerveny of Stamen, San Francisco.

Jan-Christoph’s talk, entitled “Imagining behavioral change – Smart meters and data visualizations of energy consumption” draws from Experientia’s successful competition entry at Low2No in Helsinki, Finland.

The presentation will introduce conceptual frameworks, insights and visual prototypes from a recent, collaborative project of Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton and Experientia for a Low2No carbon emissions competition for Helsinki Harbor. Sitra, the Finnish innovation agency, selected the winning team out of 74 initial entries, for their C_life – City as living factory of ecology project. The aim is to construct an urban zone with low or no carbon emissions in Helsinki, Finland, by 2012.

While other team members devised the architectural and financial strategies for the project, Experientia’s responsibility was to address the delicate theme of how to initiate behavioral change to support a sustainable style of living in this completely renewed urban district. Starting with the concept that people, their contexts, social networks, habits and beliefs are crucial tools for creating sustainable change in behaviour, Experientia explored ways to offer people control over their consumption and to see the effects of their actions on the environment.

Using their expertise in designing valuable user experiences, Experientia’s strategies to empower people’s change include: developing engagement and awareness programs, through services aimed at creating social actions based on green values; using technology to assist people in making decisions, such as energy metres and dynamic pricing systems; producing positive reinforcement loops (with incentives and benefits) for people who live, work and visit Jätkäsaari; and using the community as a knowledge network to share best practices.

The competition highlighted the need of stakeholder participation and replicability of the selected ideas. The presentation will focus on showcasing initial research insights and smart meter prototypes to support behavioral change. The speaker will show initial smart meters from the competition entry, their data visualizations and the challenges to get them realized.

Medialab-Prado provides live video streaming of the event.