In the comments to an earlier post, pfly asked a key question that hits on a problem designers and architects of green interfaces will need to consider as we strive to make more useful tools. pfly lives in the Pacific Northwest, where emissions of greenhouse gases due to electricity generation tend to be less, since about half of the power comes from hydroelectric generation. In terms of carbon emissions, a kWh in Seattle is not the same as a kWh in London. What solutions are out there now to account for the difference?

Most carbon footprint calculators, for example, use national averages of co2-per-kWh. Fortunately, however, there is one from safeclimate.net (there may be others; I’m not sure) that asks you what state/province and country you are in, and accounts for that in its calculations. That’s better, certainly, though I’d argue that there’s still a long way to go before these calculators are where they need to go.

Designers and engineers need to get cozy with measurements like co2/kWh (pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour), as we give users information appropriate to their context. Utilities need to provide feeds of emissions data along with the energy they’re serving, so that information appliances can utilize them along with utilizing the energy.

We need to move away from the idea that a typical user will do the research and data entry required for most kinds of footprinting, and instead think in terms of augmenting all of our consumables with footprint data. When I buy electric energy, data about where it comes from and its impact should come to my house as well. (AMEE, an initiative based in the UK, is indeed something to watch in the area of CO2 data; it is “designed as a neutral platform to aggregate and distribute all the CO2 data in the world. It combines measurement, profiling and transactional systems to enable this.”)

At the core, though, we’re talking about assisting people with making informed choices, and persuasive information design. Until that pie in the sky appears, there are some interesting projects already underway that will take us part of the way.

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