Eco Factor: Carbon credit meter tracks your daily emissions and encourages you to use public transport.
Industrial designers have always been challenged to imagine how product design and technology can be utilized to address social issues and shape the future. Reducing our carbon emissions is one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century. The key to making people do this is by changing their behavior.
Industrial designer Nick Hunter imagined “Carbon Credits” as a radical piece of government legislation that aims to get commuters thinking about their travel behavior and make responsible decisions to achieve more sustainable use of transportation. All commuters are provided with a monthly allowance of Carbon Credits that deplete in relation to their use of transportation.
The thinking let the designer design a device known as the Travel Key, which is worn on the hand of the user. It displays the user’s “Enviro” status by glowing, cycling colors from green (good) to red (bad). It also displays the user’s remaining carbon credits and translates this into the number of miles available per transportation type.
When the commuter boards their choice of carbon emitting transport, they have to touch the smart chip in the fingertip of the Travel Key on a chip reader installed in the vehicle. This activates the GPS tracking signal, which calculates the distance traveled and uses the type of transport along with number of passengers to calculate the used carbon credits for the journey. All this information is transmitted via Wi-Fi collated and stored on a government database.
Commuters will benefit from car sharing, use of buses and trains and using lower-emission modes of transportation, and will be penalized for misuse of transportation, e.g. driving a car as the only passenger when the journey could have been walked or cycled. Carbon Credits aims to dramatically cut CO2 emissions and reduce road congestion which is on a continuous increase year on year.
Thanks: [Nick Hunter]
