Hello! We’re still on the lookout for experts for the Homesense project, but we’re starting to focus in on London and Manchester in the UK; Paris, France; and Geneva, Switzerland.

If you’re extremely savvy with Arduino and other open hardware; are around between September-December 2010; and are interested in getting involved an awesome project around helping people build their own DIY smart homes then please get in touch! Drop us a line at georgina@tinkerlondon.com; it would be top stuff to hear from you.

Photo – JakesDad

Good news! Georgina will be talking about Homesense and the Internet of Things at the Minibar: Interweb of Things event tonight . Details details:

Friday July 30th, 2010. 6-9.30pm
Truman Brewery
Corbet Place
London, E1 6NH. (Map)

Come and say hello if you’re about!

Sad news! Our lovely lovely PhD students Natasha and Richard have their final day with us today. They have been complete stars, and although we’ll be sorry to see them go we’re delighted that they’re going to have continued involvement with the Homesense project over the coming months.

* We’re still on the hunt for households and experts! And we have more details on the slides for your viewing pleasure:

* Ambient Knowledge is a lamp that glows in different colours depending on the levels of energy consumption in the home; and it’s the rather splendid Master’s project from Alan Meany.

* The ‘Monsanto House of the Future’, was displayed at Disneyland in 1957. By 1960 it needed updating because “Many of the things deemed ‘futuristic’ in 1957 are simply ‘contemporary’ today”. One of the main attractions of the original house were that the floors, walls and ceilings were made of plastics.

If you haven’t already seen it, this is the rather beautiful map from Office of Metropolitan Architecture which proposes to redesign the entirety of Europe along energy saving lines. ‘Roadmap 2050′ aims to combine the belief that the only way to combat climate change is with drastic intervention, with greater power and meaning for the European Union.

Rather than each nation behaving in individualistic energy-generating ways, the continent becomes defined by energy territories. In Eneropa each member state provides the energy based on the capabilities of their physical geographies. Ireland and the western half of Britain become the ‘tidal states’. East Britain transforms into the ‘isles of wind’. ‘Solaria’ is formed of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, providing solar power. There’s also Biomassburg, Geothermalia and Last Hydropia. All the territories are connected by a new green grid, which isolates nodes of production and movement corridors for energy.

A 2008 article* by Hubert Guillard takes on intelligent fridges and finds them wanting. Rather than being delighted by these magical chilling machines, users of prototype intelligent fridges have been left disappointed or indifferent. As ever, the problem isn’t the technology – these fridges are more than capable of chatting to the internet whilst chilling your Chablis; it’s that users don’t really see any particular use for them. Guillard says that this doesn’t spell out the death of the Internet of Things Aroud The House, just that we should think about which devices we would like to see which would be more useful, malleable and desirable.

*In French, so break out the babelfish if you need to

* Intel have built the Oasis project for the smart kitchen. It includesobject recognition that triggers applications to generate shopping lists.

* FabLab house, a sustainable house fabbed by CNC machines and built as part of Europe’s Solar Decathlon.

* Enabling Calorie-Aware Cooking in a Smart Kitchen – Chi, Chen, Chu and Lo, 2008.

I was recently invited to the Design Museum in London to view Sustainable Futures, an exhibition of design and architectural approaches to sustainability. This exhibition is a demonstration of the role that design and designers play in the sustainability and energy debate. Concepts exhibited ranged from Mathieu Lehanneur’s ‘Local River’ a conceptual domestic ‘refrigerator-aquarium’ that breeds freshwater fish and grows herbs to the ‘Energy Aware Clock’ by Interactive Institute, Sweden.

The ‘Energy Aware Clock’ is a beautiful design which functions by graphically displaying household energy usage enabling comparative analysis over selected periods of time.

Next, ‘Ration me up’ carbon ration book by “The Ministry of Trying to Do Something About It’ that aims to make individuals more conscious of their carbon consumption, by rationing a ‘fair share of the worlds resources’. This provides a one month quota of carbon ration coupons for water, food and clothing and grounds the information imparted in the users daily routine and in a way in which we can grasp the impact of consumerism.

‘Changing Habbits’, by Giraffe Innovation, is an online project where users are invited to create their ‘habbit’. This is a humaniod representation where distortion in the body of the “Habbit’ relates directly to the consumer behaviour of the user. The approach works on a visual level, where a users negative behaviour data is processed and presented in a way that is obvious and easily understood.

While this demonstrates the role of designers in the energy, sustainability debate, it raises the question as to what is the role of non-designers and what will they design?