Mizu
Potable water, an extremely precious resource, is taken for granted in much of the United States. Only 4% of the world’s water is fresh, and of that, only 1% is available for human use. Additionally, the cleaning and processing of fresh water generates billions of harmful carbon miles. For a project sponsored by R/GA, we tackled this pressing environmental issue by designing a mobile and web platform that engages emerging water sensor technology to encourage users to budget their water use.
Contributions
Research
Concept Development
UI Design
Animation
Collaborators
Lou Butler, MDes in CPID
Wes Johnson, MDes in IxD
Timeline
4 weeksBrief
Two of R/GA’s executives, Chloe Gottlieb and Brandt Flomer, came to the Graduate Design Studio with a challenge: use data to drive behavior change. The brief was very open and we could pull from any data stream and attack behavior change on any number of levels, from individual to community-wide.
Process
With only a few weeks for project completion and limited time for initial research, our team sought to identify quickly a familiar problem. We were drawn to the challenge of water consumption which, unlike electricity and carbon miles, is generally not viewed as a pressing environmental issue, although our background research suggested otherwise. So we posed the question: “How do we get people to care about their water use and change their behavior in a positive way?”
We began by seeking and compiling information and data on water consumption in the United States and abroad to better understand the ramifications of wasteful water use. Then, we searched for existing products and applications that had addressed the issue. Without the time to develop a fully integrated product system, we decided to base our application on the data gathered from a system like HydroSense, anticipating such monitoring devices will be widely available over the next several years.
We developed scenarios as a way to determine the product features we wanted to develop for our video sketch and prototype. This process helped our team conceptualize how the application could fit into a user’s daily life and how we could target individual behaviors and initiate change. This led to the realization that a mobile application would be an ideal component of the user’s experience.
For the UI, we strayed from heavy-handed metaphors and used color, tone, and shape to suggest water. We spent a great deal of time exploring the various ways water-use data can be displayed and how an user’s interactions with the data can reveal multiple levels of information.
Solution
Mizu enables users to monitor and understand their water consumption habits through an easy-to-use mobile and web interface. It collects its data through a real-time monitoring system such as HydroSense. With Mizu, users can budget their consumption, track their consumption across time and appliance, and receive contextual notifications to influence their behavior. Our demo highlights a few of the ways users can interact with their data.
