Voyeuristic environmentalists, today might be a day of celebration. Word on the street is that partially Seattle-based Honest Buildings, the folks that have made commercial and residential building information more transparent to the interested average Joe, has teamed up with private software company Lucid to provide easy access for the everyday citizen to examine a building's energy usage. Lucid's plan has always been to be a resource especially for building occupants to have the data visualization and communication tools to manage and hopefully reduce their energy consumption. We caveat the urban environmentalist fete with "might be" because many of Seattle's buildings listed on Honest Buildings have yet to receive a "Lucid Building Dashboard ID", thereby rendering it difficult to really get excited about accessing "real-time performance data."
Nonetheless, the virtual teamwork to make buildings and their materials and energy usage more transparent to the public is worthy of at least a golf clap. We'll rally the hemp-wearing hippies for a full out festival when more info is accessible.
· Honest Buildings [official site]
· Lucid Design Group [official site]