Prepaid power to the small people

I’d like to share a 3 week research project I worked on while being at the School of Design Thinking. Together with my fellows Jan Grippenkoven, Anna Ißelburg and Olga Scupin a concept for a service product named ‘Tally’ was conceived dealing with the question of “How might we sensitise children at the age of 7 to 12 to energy consumption?”


In-depth interviews with kids, parents and teachers revealed that energy and its usage are too abstract to be understood by both the young and the old – especially when provided in kilowatt hours.

A two-part service concept addresses that. Instead of kWh ‘Tally’ translated the children’s currently consumed energy into comprehensible use hours and allows kids to manage the weekly rationing given by their parents. A hardware plug counts the amount of energy being used and communicates wirelessly with a software. The application visualises and forecasts the remaining use hours for each device as well as a compiled overview of all appliances.

Here is how ‘Tally’ is suppose to work:
❶ The energy counter is plugged between a device and the power socket – otherwise all appliances in the kids’ room stay current-less.
Tally service innovation concept to sensitise kids for energy consumption — created while at HPI School of Design Thinking

❷ A recently connected device has to be registered in the software. Thereby its power consumption is detected and constantly measured. Power is provided according to the weekly rationing given by the parents.
Tally service innovation concept to sensitise kids for energy consumption — created while at HPI School of Design Thinking

❸ A status display shows the remaining amount of energy and gives forecasts as well as calculations of usage hours of all connected devices.
Tally service innovation concept to sensitise kids for energy consumption — created while at HPI School of Design Thinking

During the 3 weeks of the projects using the HPI’s academic version of its design thinking framework we went through all six phases of the process in which we gathered great insights through several qualitative interviews and an intensive testing phase. Our final prototype, including an ‘tabable’ iPad mockup, got very positive feedback of potential users — both parents and kids — nevertheless we didn’t continue working on ‘Tally’, but maybe this blog post attracts someone’s attention …

Update: The project was featured in German interaction design magazine weave’s September issue.

Autor: Martin Jordan

Martin Jordan is a brand experience consultant and strategic creative embracing communication, design and services. He studied product, interaction and communication design as well as design thinking and worked in international brand consultancies in London, Buenos Aires and Berlin.

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