For the last several weeks I have been helping the good folks at GAFFTA (Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco) with their next Urban Innovation Weekend, coming up this weekend, July 22-24. This event runs as part of their Summer of Smart and this particular weekend, which will focus on transportation, sustainability and energy, is exciting because of a few reasons. Firstly, the city is opening up new transportation data sets specifically for the event, but secondly, we are also tackling the topic of energy-use – an issue that we believe will benefit immensely from some community-generated prototypes and thinking.

Here’s why:

Like the transportation sector before it, the energy sector is finally starting to standardize and open up its data, bringing new opportunities for people like all of us to do interesting things with it. Initiatives like the PAP10 will ensure that there is a standardized information model of energy usage that facilitates national smart grids and also allows individual consumers and other entities access to energy-use data. In addition, some states have already mandated customer access to meter-based information (hopefully we will see anonymized data at a zipcode level following this), paving the way for neighborhood energy competitions and more. Meanwhile, San Francisco is one of the first cities to require commercial buildings to take part in the Energy Manager Portfolio system, which helps owners track, assess and compare energy and water usage in individual buildings, thereby creating an incentive to reduce consumption.

These standards and initiatives are moving us towards a more transparent energy sector, and we couldn’t be happier. However, while research institutes, governments, and think-tanks are working hard to open up data and create standards, it is up to our community of developers, planners, activists, urbanists, artists, and others to dig deep into how and for whom this energy information might most benefit. In particular, how can open (and user-generated) information be used to address the fact that America’s buildings account for approximately 40% of total US energy consumption (according to the U.S. Department of Energy) and that 30% of buildings’ energy is simply wasted (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

This brings us to the second reason why this weekend is so exciting. With an estimated 100+ people coming together from all backgrounds, we can start to generate a real understanding of stakeholder needs, and incentives that can be used to power these new energy applications, projects, and ideas. These incentives can include, but should also get beyond high-level objectives – like saving the environment or doing it for the greater good. For example, we could imagine an app that targets facility managers (our custodians of energy-use in buildings) and turns them into heroes for managing their building in the most efficient manner. Equally, we could imagine interplay between tenants who spot energy inefficiencies in their building and building owners who wish to keep quality tenants while also saving money. Or how about an app for individuals, which not only allows them to keep track of their ‘good energy deeds’ but also equates this with something meaningful, like how much money or trees you are saving, in a gaming environment?

What is clear is that the energy sector is ripe for innovation at the public level, starting from the bottom up. It’s happened in transportation, and now it is energy’s turn. We have already seen a response to energy use in the material sciences sector (think improved LED lighting, low-impact or better-insulated materials or solar panels), through policy changes (one-quarter of all cities have already set targets for the use of renewable energy), and in the construction of real-time energy management systems and smart-grids, and now it is time for the Summer of Smart participants to take advantage of increasingly public data sets and use them to power the next generation of energy saving apps, project, and ideas.

Perhaps the best part of the hackathon mentality is that we have absolutely no idea what will emerge from this weekend – and I couldn’t be more excited to find out.

Why did I blog this:
In a recent discussion about possible projects that could get seed funding at UCLA, I realized that I was bandying around the term ‘ambient informatics’ without providing a proper definition for what this actually is.

When I got home, a quick Google search found that while the term has been used (in various Adam Greenfield lectures, for a workshop by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and even for a company website - that doesn’t appear to have done anything since 2005) it doesn’t have the weight that I thought it might.

We are very excited to have gathered 6 of our members from Italy, Boston, Kansas City and Los Angeles for a brainstorming session on Big Data Mashups and Behavior Chang. Please join the conversation by leaving a comment.

There is a lot of rhetoric around the idea that through collecting, visualizing and displaying 'big-data', we are providing individuals, groups and governments with a richer set of information from which they can structure better decisions and positively change their behavior. (This video of the Copenhagen Wheel provides a great overview of the vision).

However, as our most recent brainstorming session discovered, although the vision is out there, we are still in the questioning and mashing-up phase and there are very few  real-world, already implemented examples that make someone say "a-ha! I get why collecting and showing data goes beyond making pretty data visualizations and why it is useful to me, to my community and to our planet!".

This is not to say that the vision won't become a reality, just that it is a burgeoning concept that will take time to implement. What we did start to understand was that there appears to be no real methodology for understanding how behavior changes through data use.

We also collected:
a)  a number of applications that have promise for fulfilling the behavior change vision.
b) a number of applications that fulfill the behavior change vision on a personal level (as a side note, the group noted that this is where the behavior-change-through-data 'movement' is beginning - possibly because it represents the path of least resistance for new businesses).

Some applications that promise to influence behavior change:

Decal - an as yet fictional application that provides a user-friendly, universal measure way to compare products or count their daily energy intake. For example, the app would enable an 'energy dieter' to scan two otherwise identical loaves of bread and see which one required less energy to produce. However, the article goes beyond this and suggests that the Department of Energy could recommend daily energy allowances (thereby inciting behavior change).

311 - Back in November 2010 Wired posted an article and infographic about calls to the 311 hot line in New York. This is a great example of visualizing the data, but we would still love to see more evidence that this data is being used and that it affects behavior change not only of governments but also of citizens.

Bay Citizens Bikes - Bike accidents by the numbers: why, where, who's really to blame and what's being done about it (NB: it seems that the 'what's being done about it' aspect is still a work in progress.)

Various Gov 2.0 Apps - Applications like see, click fix, IBM's City Forward, CitySourced and Boston Citizens Connect all aim to collect, mash-up and display information so that action can be taken. What action has already been taken based on this data is a little unclear.

Some personal applications that promote 'positive' behavior change

Household Apps: Francisca mentioned Fooducate and the Goodguide app. Having just downloaded them, I can tell you that they already make me want to change my eating and buying habits!

Fitness Apps: Vincenzo mentioned that Runkeeper has shown that people who use their app are on average running more than they would have without it. This might be hearsay, but I have made a mental note to call up the founders and ask them some questions.

Transport Apps: Waze, Next Bus and CO2GO (still in development) are all apps that want us to think about optimizing our transportation choices or reducing the impact of traveling.

Information about the Environment:
In David McCandless's recent TED talk, he talks about the need for data to always be visualized in context if effective decisions are to be made. His own visualizations do this as does GE's CO2 comparison visualization and as Jase mentioned, power bills in the UK.

Quotes of note:
'There needs to be an open dialogue between data providers and software developers. The relationship between Boston's MBTA and developers is a good example of this and the fact that there are over 35 transportation apps in Boston is proof of the benefits of this relationship' Francisca Rojas

"I think the big problem of today is not data collection, but it is bringing the data to people in an effective way"
Vincenzo Manzoni

"Behavior change is not necessarily a direct and immediate reaction to being shown data" Jase Wilson

"Understanding behavior change is about traces and you need to be able to visualize changes over time and also visualize the choices that are presented" Adam Pruden

"What we are seeing is that there is a number of companies jumping in with different ways to personally motivate people (thereby allowing these people to change their behavior) but we are not yet seeing this on a city or global level." Christine Outram