The best creative idea of the year?

With the UK under lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, all of us are spending a lot more time at home. All those cups of tea, plugged-in laptops, and streamed TV shows are adding up to a bigger household energy footprint.

Whether you’re looking to keep your bill to a minimum or lessen your environmental impact, here are some suggestions for a greener life indoors.

E.ON energy saving with energy tariff.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s pretty simple. It’s a campaign for E.ON’s Swedish subsidiary that encourages people to reduce energy consumption not with a vapid advertising campaign but rather with a utility that combines user participation, personal data, mobile, gaming, and the Internet of Things. It shows customers their energy use in real-time, their savings when they take a specific action, and their standing visa vis their neighbors.

If that’s not enough contemporary marketing buzzwords checked off by this one application, there’s also evidence of iterative testing and crowdsourcing, all in the name of conscious capitalism. Whether or not E.ON is as worthy a company as this campaign suggests is another story, but for these purposes let’s stay focused on the creative.

A companion site let users track their progress, compare themselves to others with similar sized homes, and monitor the collective gains of an entire country. Users could share what worked for them, garner insights from each other, and create a story worthy of attention from the press, bloggers and social media communities.

In the end, the 10,000 users reduced their energy use by 12 percent.

We all know that the future of advertising and marketing is less about messages and pleas and more about inspiration. Yet inducing change, as we’ve learned from failed attempts to stop drunk driving, smoking, obesity, drug consumption, texting while driving is incredibly hard. It takes design thinking like this. And a belief in ideas that do, that involve, and that invite participation in order to achieve something worthwhile.

Sadly, most agencies won’t think this way until someone else wins a big award first. Then the race will be on. That’s why I’m hoping E.ON’s energy saving experiment wins big.

(This previously appeared on my blog Creativity_Unbound, but posted here as there seems to be a very different community.)
E.ON energy saving.

so this isn’t a choice. But one positive about being at home is the reduction in both carbon emissions and air pollution from the huge drop in car journeys. Instead, you could sometimes use your outdoor time for the day to ‘commute’ to or from the home office with a run, walk, or cycle.

E.ON energy saving with energy tariff.

The Energy Saving Trust recommends a range of 18-21ºC for healthy adults. If you tend to have the heating at the higher end of the scale, turning it down by just one degree saves energy and money. Time to make the most of the new work wardrobe of cozy jumpers, slippers, and dressing gowns.

Finish the working day by closing down your computer and turning it off at the plug. Don’t leave it on standby all night. You could also try to get into this habit with other appliances, too.