Energy — our master resource — is invisible. This might seem like a good thing, but it’s not. Because energy is invisible, we have no idea how much we are using at any given moment. At least not in terms that are meaningful to us. Sure, there are beautiful, visual calculators like this one. But — crucially — these are missing the “at-any-given-moment” part. And actually…they might even be missing the meaningful part.

Southern California Edison had it right when they installed something called an Ambient Orb in their customers’ homes. When the ball glows red, it means you’re using too much electricity; green reassures you that you’re consuming responsibly. The result: a 40% reduction in energy use during peak periods. Who knew a glowing ball could have such an impact?!

The Ambient Orb is successful at triggering change because it gathers (otherwise meaningless) information and turns it into salient feedback. Believe it or not, at the time of use, the colour of the orb means more to the user than the money it will cost (or save) to use (or not use) the appliance. 

There are two reasons why: immediacy and tangibility of the feedback. An electricity bill is in the future —  maybe a month or more away. With the red colour, however, the feedback is instant: turn off the blender, and you’re back to green.

We need glowing red orbs everywhere.

What if we took this a concept a bit further and upped the ante in terms salience? What if we replaced the red orbs with our smarphones for the immediacy part (they’re always on us) and replaced the red glow with our social graph for the tangible part (social pressure!). And what if we gathered not just information about our appliances, but for everything?

We have the technology. We have the data. Why don’t we see more red orbs? I’m certainly not the first to suggest this, and there are already many apps and services out there that attempt to recreate the red orb effect. Yet there is a huge unmet need in this space.

One thing is for sure, there are many instances where we could use the help: for saving money and investing, for saving energy and time, and for simply being better.

Heck, even for getting the chores done:

[from an old blog, published on July 27, 2010]