Next steps for using information from Victoria’s Smart Meters. Insight and actions beat data dumps every time.
The Smart Electricity Meter (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) rollout is starting to pay data dividends for Victorian electricity users.
Beginning with the Jemena Electricity Outlook Portal (on which we worked with DiUS) and most recently with Origin Energy’s revamped Origin Smart, Victorian energy distributors and retailers have worked hard to deliver energy-use data so their customers can make better-informed decisions about their energy use.
Instead of data, they need to deliver value.
The portals tend toward the same type of information display — a dashboard of bar and pie charts that show energy use over hours, days and weeks. It’s data, sure, but is it enough?
Officially announcing The Nudge podcast, and a call for guests.
Now that we’ve posted our second (or third depending on how you count these things) episode, it’s time to tell you about our podcast, The Nudge. Way back when we started The Nudge events, we wanted to be able to share the ideas behind them with more than just those people who were able to attend on the nights.
So we recorded the events.
And then we started thinking about a podcast where we talked about being a better designer (and making the world a better place). And the result is the Nudge Podcast. On our podcasts Josh Kinal, Jerome Lebel-Jones, and Ross Floate grapple with the issues related to being a better designer, and we ask special guests from around the world for their perspective as well. What kind of issues? Issues like inspiration, trust, being wrong, and the nature of responsibility.
As we continue to present our events, we’ll keep including the audio from the live interviews as special episodes to our podcast – you can hear Elise Peyronnet from Melbourne Music Week on Episode 0.
Future episodes of the podcast (yes, they’re already recorded and in the can) include Ned Dwyer from Tweaky.com, Chris Clarke (now of Black Pixel), Brad Ellis of Pacific Helm, Jayne Lewis of Two Birds Brewing, and Associate Professor Peter McGraw of the Humor Code. You can listen to the podcast at the website, follow via rss or you can subscribe on iTunes.
Are you interested in being a guest on The Nudge? Do you have something you’d like to hear discussed? We’re all ears. Drop us an email, or let us know in the comments.
Pick up the &%#$& phone!
I spend a lot of time lamenting the unwillingness of designers to get on the telephone and actually talk to clients or suppliers. Apparently so does Greg Storey at Happy Cog. He recently wrote a great post about it and rather than re-hash it, we thought we’d make a nice motivational poster. Greg, hope you see this, and hope you like it.
Illustration by our own Marty Cook.
There are no ninjas here
At Floate, we employ three developers. There is one full time developer and two designers who can also develop.
None of us are ninjas. Nor are we rock stars. The mere suggestion we are brogrammers is likely to get us seething.
When we develop, we are developers and we’re good at our jobs. We don’t need escapist language to pretend we’re something we’re not.
The importance of being mobile.
We’ve written before about the importance of strong mobile designs for hospitality websites. Over the past year, we’ve launched a number of responsive sites, including large-scale work for ANZ and Origin Energy. More recently, we’ve built and launched sites for some much smaller (but still fantastic) organisations that are very close to our hearts. Having had these sites online for some time now, we can tell you some of the things we’ve learned. Read more
