While our team has finally met this week with our faculty mentors for the first time, there is still much more for us to learn about the project. Once we learn more about the official status of the dashboard, we will be able to set feasible goals. Until then, our approach for setting our goals (awareness & vision) will be collaborative and positive. We plan to set goals that mark positive, measurable, and concrete progress. Just recently we have gained access to the previous team’s set of project requirements and backlog tasks, which we will be using to identify our vision and goals. After we have begun to pick up where the previous team left off, we will come together as a team in an open-minded space of discussion where any conflict of ideas will inspire creative solutions.
Our main priority for the dashboard will be conveying accurate data to the student body and faculty. The dashboard should also be accessible and easy to understand for anyone viewing it, regardless of their working knowledge of the university’s energy and water usage. As we begin the onboarding process, our baseline analysis of the project will mostly come from a series of kickoff meetings and asking lots of questions. Professors Kreider and Yeakel will be incredibly important during this phase since they have worked with the dashboard already, so we plan to utilize their knowledge of the current state of the project to begin our work and to build upon previous progress.
Creative solutions for this project will most likely be the greatest challenge of the semester. Our project is still in the early stages of development, so we will have to be able to adapt and pivot when necessary, while also keeping our goals of accessibility, data accuracy, and sustainability in mind. No idea or proposal should be left off the table; sharing all ideas, no matter how big or how small, will lead us to developing creative solutions. As of right now, one possible idea for improving the dashboard would be to incorporate energy and water usage over time, so that users can observe trends and fluctuations as opposed to just current usage. Another important aspect of the site is the ability to post additional dashboards; Professor Kreider is specifically interested in adding energy competition progress to the current dashboard. We need to anticipate what features the competitions will require. For example, leaderboards will be added to display the lowest consumption and surveys or quizzes will show who has the best understanding of sustainability.
As the semester progresses, our dashboard will change, but hopefully, our main priorities will stay constant. Again, we may need to reevaluate as we work on the dashboard, but for now, we have identified sustainability, accessibility, and accuracy as our highest priorities. If these must change, we will use these ideas as inspiration for developing more relevant goals.
The most important metric of success for all three pillars of sustainability will stem from a decrease in energy consumption. Since the dashboard will track the use of energy over time, data showing a decrease in energy usage will show that Lehigh is being more energy conscious. On the other hand, if Lehigh’s energy usage is high, the dashboard could provide an additional incentive for the university to transition to renewable energy and save money, since rising gas prices will be less and less relevant throughout the transition process.
The dashboard will also bridge a social gap between people who have the means to accumulate knowledge on energy and the environment and those who are not as fortunate by providing simple, relevant analogies so anyone can understand the impact of our energy usage.
Decreasing energy consumption or circularizing energy and water use will allow Lehigh to save money that can be reinvested in more productive directions. Economic prosperity requires long term systems. The dashboard should be adaptive and easy to update so that it can be used with whatever new technology Lehigh implements in the future.
The design strategies are most pertinent to our project because we want the dashboard to be user friendly. Designing for flexibility will be important because we want the project to have a lasting impact. The website should be able to adapt to changes in technology. In particular, with Lehigh’s efforts to shift to green energy, we want to ensure that the site can track the renewable energy usage and still properly report data from our shark meters. If at any point in the future those meters are replaced with a different system, we want the dashboard to still be functional and easy to edit. Our code and data should be simple to understand for the next CSIF members as well as any faculty that may be involved in the project in the future.
Standardization is another useful strategy because we need the data to be easy to read. Colors schemes and units will be important for users to understand their consumption rates. We also want our dashboard to be consistent with Lehigh’s branding and visual identity guide where appropriate.
A strategy relevant to our coding and computing power is resource efficiency. We want to minimize the number of steps between data collection and final display on the dashboard. The previous dashboard team had developed a process for this, so once we learn more about how their process works, we will determine any opportunities for optimization.
These strategies together, if implemented correctly, will amount to an additional strategy that is eco-design. Flexibility, reparability, and resource efficiency are all important facets of designing for the environment. By focusing on these individual aspects of eco-design via the ideas listed above, we will ultimately produce a virtual product that is both environmentally conscious and informative.
The last strategy we have identified is the integrated design process. While we plan to divide into subteams to tackle different issues with the dashboard, coming together as a whole team to collaborate and refine ideas will still be an important part of our meetings. Establishing open communication with each other and with our professors, mostly through Slack, groupme, and email, will create an open and safe discussion for idea synthesis. We also are going to establish a set of team expectations to help create this environment.