Background -- The power crisis triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, brought everyone's attention to focus on saving electricity. It was a sober time that needed a little brightening. And so Dentsu Design Ninja set about finding some lighter means of saving energy. Communication -- individuals' messaging practice -- would provide the opportunity in the form of Setsu-denpo, or "power-saving" telegrams, here named "energygrams" for short.
What if reminders to turn off unnecessary electricity could be attached to people's daily e-mails and text messages? How could it work? A user writes a message, submits it to the service and gets it back in the form of a URL to be pasted on a facebook page, or into a tweet or an e-mail. You send the URL.
The message recipient clicks on the link, which prompts a carrier-pigeon mascot named Mr. Switch-off to deliver the full text of the message. But first, Mr. Switch-off asks the recipient to turn the light off. Once the computer's webcam senses that the light has dimmed, the message appears on the screen as a kind of constellation of stars, light reversed out dark.
And it works! Within two weeks of the launch of EnergyGram, users reduced electrical usage by a total of about four hours.
Webサイトのイメージ Web page image
伝言鳩のスイッチョフさん Mr. Switch-off, the power-saving carrier pigeon