Water conservation in rented households

Before I share the design concept, I would like to point out two special components of this project:

(1st) This intervention manifests as an electronic device. I generally hesitate to endorse solutions that are primarily electronic technology-based. While this intervention uses technology, I invite you to be mindful of using technology as a general problem-fixer in the realm of environmental challenges due to their large footprint. Overall, I believe that we need to leave the paradigm of "creating more" and embrace "degrowth." This project might be walking on a thin edge unless installed in places with a large amount of interacting people. 

(2nd) This project has been inspired by our personal struggle with conserving water in the kitchen and prior experience with water trackers. With this project, we honor our own lives as our personal laboratories, which we consider essential in an integrative research practice that is commensurate with reality. This approach draws inspiration from black feminist practice, which draws much power from acknowledging our bodies, minds, and spirits as laboratories from which we can learn (King & Njaka 2023).

The Eco-visualization Design Concept
As resource consumption is largely invisible to consumers, there is a desire on the consumer end to get in touch with real-time data (Chetty 2008). Eco-visualization tools are technological devices that track consumed resources and visualize the used resource. While some eco-visualization devices offer concrete data or tools to analyze consumption, others abstract the consumption into shapes or colors that indicate states of consumption (Pierce 2008). While pragmatic visualization such as graphs aid an immediate need for analysis, artistic visualizations have a sublime character “which inspires awe, grandeur, and evokes a deep emotional and/or intellectual response” (Kosara 2007 p. 3).

Since we intended to evoke a reflective process in the consumer of water, an artistic visualization & educative visualization which relates the consumed resources to tangible units seemed appropriate.

Essentially, we designed an interface for an artistic eco-visualization tool that may also offer the depth of analysis to deepen reflection if the user is interested. The strategy behind choosing an artistic visualization is to “create enough of an enigma to keep an audience interested without being easy to solve” (Kosara 2007 p. 3).
Tying these intentions together, we designed the concept for a visualization device which is currently in the making. The device engages with the person who turns on the kitchen faucet through the glowing of a light. This light changes its color from a light pulsing green to heavy red as the daily limit for sink water is reached. The glowing light is intended to serve as an artistic visualization to elicit curiosity.

Disclaimer: numbers for maximum daily water usage should be revised and adapted based on the surrounding ecological conditions. 

How do we reason about interventions?
An intervention may be effective for more than one reason. For instance, the installation of an art piece that changes shape based on the water usage of a household can give immediate feedback about water consumed. However, it may also induce wondering, make kids curious about its relationship to behaviors, and eventually create a ripple effect of change. 

Donella Meadow lends us a helpful list of leverage points in complex systems. We can use this list as a lens through which we can assess the strength of an intervention. The systems we consider for the sake of this report are complex due to their interconnected, non-linear nature (social-ecological systems).

Toward the end of the list, the highest leverage interventions read “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises” and “the power to transcend paradigms.” These most high-leverage interventions indicate that a shift of the place from which humans operate individually and collectively is the most powerful driver of change. For instance, a person might go through a paradigm-shift from “the effect of my conservation efforts is negligible” to “the power of practicing conservation efforts goes beyond the material conservation and extends to the effect on my social field.”

Due to the strong leverage of paradigm changes, we designed a device which may induce a reflection process and lead to powerful behavior change down the road. 

Where could this device create impact?
As you know by now, we analyzed the situation of renting households. While our target consumers were renting households, we see the opportunity to expand areas for application to places where humans use water but do not see or pay the water bill. Such places include many public places with showers or frequent faucet use, such as schools, gyms, public swimming pools, and communal living spaces. We recommend the installation of our eco-visualization device in a location that many people use to increase social engagement around water consumption habits. We see another opportunity to influence children in their early stages of becoming-aware. This could elicit questions such as: "How much food could our school grow with the water we saved last year compared to the year before the installation?"

Of course, renting households are a perfect place for our device
Community water usage in California accounts, on average, for 10% of the state’s water consumption, and broken down into indoor use alone, the median usage per capita is roughly 48 gallons per day (Mount et al., 2023; Armstrong, 2021). Increasingly high housing prices are common within the state and cause 44% of Californians to rent the home they live in (Johnson et al., 2023). 

Taking dishwashers as an example, one study found that only 55% of rented homes in the United States have a dishwasher, with only 12% of those rentals having an energy efficient dishwasher (Best et al., 2020). Dishwashers use roughly 3.5 times less water than washing by hand, making them a superior alternative to washing dishes for the 45% of renters who live without (Barry 2017, Berckhols et. al 2010).

The eco-visualization device will likely help consumers to reflect on their dishwashing habits and further influence their food consumption habits by educating on embedded water in their food choices. 

In the spirit of recommending the next steps for the Alameda Country Resource Conservation District, we see great potential in installing one or two devices in Alameda County and study water consumption before and after installation to prove the intended effect of our design. 

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Sources

Armstrong, A. (2021, November 30). State agencies recommend indoor residential water use standard to legislature. Department of Water Resources. https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2021/Nov-21/State-Agencies-Recommend-Indoor-Residential-Water-Use-Standard#:~:text=The%20report%20notes%20that%20the,gallons%20per%20capita%20per%20day. 

Berkholz, P., Stamminger, R., Wnuk, G., Owens, J., & Bernarde, S. (2010). Manual dishwashing habits: an empirical analysis of UK consumers. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 34(2), 235–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2009.00840.x