greener gadgets winner
I promised to post on the winners of the Greener Gadgets Design Competition, and I completely forgot.
You may like to remind yourself of my tips – I went for Recompute (the recyclable cardboard computer) and the RITI printer, which converted coffee and tea dregs into ink for printouts.
Both of these made it to the top 13, but not to the final shortlist of 4. The final winner was Tweet-a-Watt, pictured below.
Have you ever seen anything less inspiring in your life? The purpose of this nondescript little gadget is to measure the daily power consumption of a household, and then automatically ‘tweet’ it for all to see. I can see that knowing how much you consume, and setting yourself targets to reduce the total is a good idea, but the main point of this gadget is the element that allows the Twitter updates.
Why would you want to do that? If it was supposed to create a culture of shame around over-consumption, I could maybe get behind the idea, but there’s no mention of anything like that. It just seems designed to tap into the morbid curiosity about other people’s dull existences that Twitter engenders already. (I’m not a fan. Can you tell?)
The only aspect of this that impresses me is that they have made the hardward opensource – ie you can download the design, the instructions and the scripts you need to make your own for no charge. Now that’s a good idea. Shame their product is so pointless.