Uit de Meterkast
Measuring energy use in the living space.
As a child, people told me to turn off the light whenever I left a room, because I should think of the polar bears. However, it always remained rather unclear how the polar bears at the North Pole would actually benefit from me flipping my light switch.
While we have become more and more dependent on our infrastructures, the infrastructures themselves have become more and more complex. At some point, we stopped understanding them. How many kWh do I even use per day?
I started my project with my own frustration, not understanding at all how energy works, where it comes from and how much I use. So I did a crash course into energycoaching and visited peoples houses, where I recognized this lack of understanding. In the meterbox (meterkast) I found an analogue meter, that turns faster when you are using more energy. Why are we hiding this valuable information in the hallway? Why are we not living with it? My series of lamps and meterboxes, are part of a manifesto for a prepaid system for energy use, in order to recover a feel for volumes and quantities that we have lost.