Dorm Energy Competition Design: week 3

For this project a set of well defined goals we do not have. It's been difficult trying to come up with ideas to work toward and I think that's one of our groups main challenges. Yet we've been able to come up with enough ideas to work toward and achieve a certain amount of progress. For instance I had an idea on thursday to use the data generated by WattDepot our software tool that outputs energy usage to provide more information to the users.
So that's what I did. I made mockups of how graphs would be represented depending on the length of time. So if you wanted to look at a week long graph of KW/HR then it will also calculate the total KW/HR used and then convert it to dollars. Hawaii is the state with the highest price of energy in the United States. If students are to become energy literate, learning about our high prices would be a good incentive to begin. Another thing I did with this was in listing the possible ways to show the KiloWatt Hour. If we can make more tangible relations to other values with the KiloWatt Hour, maybe students will get a better grasp of what it is. So I got ideas to convert the data to carbon output in tons, or the fuel used.
I've also started to work on making a ranking system for display purposes. I'm not exactly sure how to work it out yet. The important thing is to figure out a way to display the energy consumption per floor for the dorms and also show rankings for the floors for Kukui Nuts. This goes back to scoring and I think it's worth further investigating into.
A topic that Professor Johnson proposed was of a permanent site to host all energy matters for the dorms or campus. It would either have a link that to the Kukui competition or inactive part of the site that would take over during the competition schedule and then fall back afterwards. I thought it was a good idea so my teammate Anthony and I drew up a quick mockup to see what it would look like. It gave us a some thought into how to properly introduce our project. Because on the mockup, there is a reference to a video which gives our mission statement. It might be cool to just make a small clip to frame our objectives.
So I think there's a lot more to be done. I could work on the ranking display, creative more displays for the values, or explore more ideas on this permanent site. My primary focus is on the data.

These are the mockups I updated. They are labelled charts.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/source/browse/#svn/mockups/TeamGreenSmart

This is for the permanent page.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/source/browse/#svn/mockups/freshmanDormEnergyIssue