On Method Design and Efficiency

In acting, there is a school of training known as “Method Acting,” whose proponents begin preparing for a role by immersing themselves in the culture they are trying to portray. Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro are three well-known practitioners, often going to great lengths to remain in character, even after the cameras are turned off. Daniel Day-Lewis famously refused treatment for pneumonia while on the set of “Gangs of New York,” because there wasn’t any treatment for the condition in the 19th Century, when the film was set.

As a designer, every day is a new career for me, something I see as very similar to acting. My tools are the same day-to-day, but the culture is different. Some days I am in the trucking business, and other days I help sell multi-tools or circuit boards. Most days, I do all three. It’s probably the thing I like most about my job.

Very early in my career, I learned that my own aesthetic tastes were nearly irrelevant to the work I do after presenting a whiz-bang, Star-Trek-looking site design for the historic city of Council Bluffs, Iowa. I sold it, but it went over like a lead balloon once it escaped the marketing committee. Since that day, I’ve become a firm believer in design that is rooted in and inspired by the client’s customers’ culture.

To that end, I spend a lot of time trying to get to know my clients’ business better. I began religiously carrying a Leatherman tool on my belt the day I accepted a job at Pop Art. I’ve been to the Mid-America trucking show twice in an effort to get to know Freightliner and Detroit Diesel’s business better (See 2008 photo below for proof/blackmail purposes).

This week, I had the opportunity to explore a new (to me, and the world) industry: energy efficiency. There are many new options for generating clean, green energy (PGE offers customers the opportunity to pay a little extra for wind power). At the consumer level, there are federal tax credits available for adding photovoltaic panels or solar water heating elements to your roof. Similar options are available for businesses. The downside to these, of course, is the high initial cost of the equipment, and long payback period (10-20 years in some cases). In this economy, it’s tough for businesses or consumers to justify the high capital investment required for long-term energy savings.

Enter SensorIQ, one of Pop Art’s newest clients, and a pioneer in energy efficiency. SensorIQ helps businesses like Nike to better understand their energy consumption so operations can be made more efficient. SensorIQ’s monitoring equipment and software allow operations managers to see with a high degree of accuracy energy consumption of individual machines within their manufacturing operations. A sensor monitoring an aging air compressor can tell the operations manager when that machine might need maintenance (a leaky air hose causing the compressor to cycle on more frequently), or replacement. It’s efficiency intelligence that provides immediate energy (and cost) savings.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on perspective), I’m not an operations manager, and it’s difficult for a method designer like me to understand the complexities of a large manufacturing facility, particularly when that facility is located overseas. So, in order to better understand SensorIQ’s business, I did the next best thing, and bought a new consumer energy monitoring device called a “Kill A Watt” to help me better understand energy consumption and reduction.

I installed the device last Friday, and monitored my energy use throughout the day. I plugged the device into the outlet beneath my desk, and then plugged my power strip into the Kill A Watt. My power strip is responsible for supplying power to both of my Dell Monitors, and my Dual Core Apple Tower (2 x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon chips, 3 GGB RAM). Immediately, I started noticing things. Computer asleep and monitors switched off, my setup requires about 170 Watts of power, or the equivalent of about 3 60-watt light bulbs. Fully-powered, I’m drawing anywhere from 230-250 watts, depending on how heavily I’m taxing the machine (e-mail’s on the lower end of the scale, rendering video at the high end). After a full day’s work, I’d consumed 2.25 Kilowatts of electricity, or about 15 cents worth of electricity (the figuring of which caused me to re-design Portland’s rate chart, below). Not bad, right? Over a full year (235 work days), that works out to about $35 worth of electricity per year.

As I left last Friday, I did what I normally do. I switched off the monitors, and left the tower powered, but sleeping. As a green-conscious Portland-er, I know I should shut down the PC before I leave, but I like just flipping on the monitors and hit the ground running when I arrive on Monday mornings, so I was curious to see how much power I’d waste over the weekend. The answer? I drew 10.5 kilowatts of energy. Weekends are generally a little cheaper (3.675 cents/kw-hr vs. 11.027 cents/kw-hr in peak periods), so it only cost 30 cents to leave it on for the 60-odd hours between leaving Friday and arriving Monday. Multiplied by 52 weekends/year, that’s $15 to leave the PC on over the weekend. Multiplied by 20 Pop Artists, that’s $300 per year we could be saving. It’s not a lot, but in an economy like this, every little bit helps, right?

After my initial research, I have two questions:

1. Does the additional wear and tear of turning off and turning on a computer 52 times justify the energy savings?
2. Is your agency working this hard to understand your business?