Visualizing Energy Consumption Using Physical Artifacts

This thesis work will focus on the area of visualization. Visualization is a term that covers a wide range of visual representations. Visual representations may be used for giving a user feedback on things ranging from how long it’s before the next bus will take of to the wear on equipment. The work presented in this report will focus on presenting users with feedback on energy consumption using visualization as a tool.Today there exists numerous ideas and developed solutions to visualize energy consump- tion. Some of these will be covered and described in this work to give the reader an idea of how energy may be presented with current technology to provide the user with feedback concerning energy consumption.A visualization solution will also be presented which is based on several ideas that are presented in this report. This solution will aim at providing users with a way to visualize energy consumption using hardware that are either available directly at a local store or via an Internet retailer and that requires no modification or customization to get working. The solution uses both a desktop application and hardware devices for customizing and displaying the visualization.At the end of this report an analysis consisting of advantages and drawbacks of the developed solution will be presented. This will hopefully give the reader a more in- depth understanding of the application, possible improvements and advantages of the introduced solution.Ideas for possible future work will also be discussed in order to act as a basis for possible improvements and further development of the solution. These improvements would help in making the solution, which allows for customizability and which uses easily available hardware, to be available and usable by the general public.Validerat; 20120627 (anonymous