ResearchResearch Overview
Building Dashboard® is designed to drive energy conservation through behavior change, something that we accomplish by enabling non-technical people to understand and manage their consumption in the context of an energy-smart social network. While breaking new ground with the first real-time, socially-comparative energy use information on the web, we have continued to test the efficacy of many new and exciting ways of engaging, educating, motivating and empowering communities of people to conserve resources and save money. As Building Dashboard® evolves, our commitment to pioneering research remains at the forefront of what we do.
Lucid's journey began in 2002 in one of the first modern green buildings in the world, the Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College. This innovative building "ecosystem" produced its own solar energy, recycled its own water and closed the material loop, but had not provided necessary feedback to building occupants. Our goal was to engage occupants and visitors by showing real-time environmental performance of the building and landscape.
The idea we set out to test, develop and market is now widely accepted here and around the world: real-time resource use feedback has the potential to save energy and water in a big way. Smarter building occupants, not just smarter buildings or control technologies, are key to resource conservation. Lucid's goal: to change the way we think, act and consume by transforming passive consumers into active managers of resource use.
Consider the "Prius Effect": when you can see how your car is performing in real time, you tend to fine-tune usage in order to improve, sustain and eventually surpass your current level of performance. This phenomenon is especially true when friends, family and spouses get involved, each competing to outperform the recent mile-per-gallon "winner." By analogy, the outcome of using Building Dashboard® is like the social and psychological effect produced by using the energy monitor in a hybrid vehicle.
From Tour de France contestants to Wall Street brokers, real-time feedback is required to make smart, game-winning decisions. One of Lucid's research objectives is to quantify the degree to which resource use information is effective -- under what circumstances, at what scales and resolutions, and in what forms delivered to the user. So far, our team has demonstrated that real-time feedback can reduce consumption by between 10% and 56%.
