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Building Dashboards
Update on this Dashboard: The New York Times has featured the Oberlin Total Electricity Consumption dashboard in their Green Inc. Energy, The Environment and the Bottom Line series. See An Energy Dashboard for Buildings.
Also: The Building Dashboard used by the University of Vermont can now be viewed at that link. And, see this Emory University Building Dashboard and University of Colorado Building Dashboard
A Dashboard Spy video showing the interactive dashboard has also been posted below.
Building dashboards, of course, is the topic of discussion here at Dashboards by Example, The Dashboard Spy and Dashboards.TV, where we bring you real-life examples of business intelligence visualizations. Today, however, let’s take the term “building dashboards” literally, and look at dashboards for buildings (i.e. “Building Dashboards”). Yes, there are dashboards being used for monitoring the metrics of running actual buildings. They show real-time resource use information and are catching on as a hot, new way of making a building “smart”.
What’s green and has B.I. all over it? Why, a Building Dashboard, of course. The latest in helping buildings maximize their “greenness” is the use of dashboard applications to publish energy consumption metrics. Live weather conditions, building resident community event calendars and water usage KPIs are often featured on these building dashboards.
Let’s look at some actual examples. There is one group that is putting together some very slick and compelling building dashboards. Lucid Design Group is pioneering the use of information feedback techniques such as KPI dashboards to conserve resource use by commercial buildings and homes. Their Lucid Design Group Building Dashboard is catching on at universities and other “green-aware” sites looking to make resource consumption transparent to the users and owners of buildings.
Take a look a this very graphically-pleasing screenshot from the Building Dashboard used at the University of Vermont:
Here is a Dashboard Spy video showing the dashboard in action. Be sure to use the link at the top of this post to visit the dashboard itself.
The stated goal of the Building Dashboard is to “make energy and water use visible in real time”. Here is a schematic of the components of the system. Click on the “more” link that follows to view more screenshots of the building dashboards. Be sure to do so, because some of the graphics are quite nicely designed.
Here is the generalized flow of the Building Dashboards:
From the description of the Building Dashboard:
Building Dashboard is a web-based display technology that provides real-time feedback on resource use and helps us to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Check out your consumption right now, or look at consumption patterns over time. Don’t understand what a kilowatt-hour is? Instead, see how many dollars you’re spending or pounds of CO2 you’re emitting into the atmosphere. Go a step further and instantly compare your building’s energy and water use with other
buildings, or launch a competition and rival your friends and coworkers to reduce their consumption.Lucid’s interactive touch-screen kiosks and websites are designed to transform passive consumers into active managers of resources. With Building Dashboard® you can equip employees to lead your company toward energy reduction goals, engage students in energy competitions across residence halls, identify ways to save money on your apartment’s utility bills, and publicly demonstrate your organization’s commitment to stewardship of the planet’s resources.
Buildings account for 2/3 of the electricity used in the U.S. and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. But if you could know how much you’re consuming, and comprehend the financial and environmental consequences of consumption, would you use less? Not surprisingly, dozens of studies point to “Yes.” Real-time feedback provided by Building Dashboard has been used to effectively reduce consumption on the order of 10-56%. More power to the people.
Here is a series of close-up screengrabs of the dashboards.
This is how you select a view (for example, energy consumption per person, per 1000 square feet, or total). Note the nifty bottom tag with the upwards arrow to show the onstate for the “Viewpoint” tab.
This is a little gimmicky but fun. You can select unit equivalents (see how many lightbulbs worth of energy you are using or how many carbon units).
You would use a selector such as this to choose an area to examine the metrics for:
Of course you can slice the data via time. Choose last view, yesterday, today, this week, etc. as your timescale.
The dashboard can serve as an educational tool for the building users as well. Here is a shot of an explanation of the building’s solar photovoltaic system.
Here is a dashboard panel that focuses on electricity usage, particularly the amount of money saved by using solar power:
What do you think of this building dashboard? It’s impressing a lot of people who are new to business intelligence dashboards.
Here is a comment by someone interested in Boulder Colorado building trends:
This past July, CU Boulder installed Building Dashboards in two campus buildings, Baker and Libby Hall. You might be wondering, what are Building Dashboards? Made by Lucid Design Group, the dashboard is a resource that fosters a unique approach to energy conservation and education. It is a user-friendly system to track energy performance and ratings in real time. The goal for these dashboards are to help educate individuals about their day to day energy consumption via an array of visible and easily interpretable images. This web-based technology renders the environmental performance of buildings, providing information to compare current data to historical data, as well as compare one building’s energy use to another.
In addition to energy data, this dashboard provides information about the building and it’s green features, as well as a tutorial to show how the dashboard works and retrieves data. Dashboards can be customized to each building and client needs, as they are currently installed throughout a number of other University campuses, commercial buildings, and residential homes. The best way to fully understand the power of these dashboards is to check them out for yourself. Below are links to systems that are currently installed, where you can interact with this data.
What I like most about this innovation is that it can be used by anyone who has access a computer. You don’t need to be an engineer, environmentalist, or an energy expert to gain knowledge of the building’s consumption. This is an incredible tool that will help individuals to better understand their footprint, and hopefully become more conscious and aware to better manage their own consumption. It will be interesting to see how the student population at CU interacts with this system, and if they are able to decrease their energy consumption by becoming more aware of their usage.
What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.
12 Responses to “Building Dashboards”
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Gee, not a very effective use of space.
The first screen shot has two rows of navigation icons which occupy nearly the bottom half of the display. Nearly the top quarter is taken up with logo/header. This leaves precious little room for the actual chart, which is so cramped the horizontal axis has been left off.
The icons on later displays (e.g., Total, Per Person, Per 1000 Sq Ft) take up as much space as the actual minimal amount of data shown.
None of the displays shown here contain more than a single chart, and some contain less.
The dashboard panel displaying Dollars Made from Solar takes up a lot of room for a single value.
I think that whether this dashboard is good or not depends on its intended audience.
If it is intended as a management tool, then it takes an appalling amount of space to say not much, and will require the manager to keep flipping between screens to find all the information they require.
If on the other hand it is (as it appears to be) targetted at the general public, then the large, friendly elements are a plus, as is displaying the minimum of information on each screen, to avoid causing confusion.
In either case, the dashboard must be clear and unambiguous, no matter how much content it manages to cram in. This seems to manage that fairly well.
I think these are the kind of dashboards that make people go “Oohhh!” the first time they see it, but that make people more and more annoyed every time they try to actually *use* the dashboards to try to monitor the data and take action on it.
In some of these, it’s hard to tell whether this is just a “menu/selection screen” that just happens to have a fragment of an artsy graph in the background(?) … or are these the actual dashboards/graphs?
Looks like there are lots of charts showing consumption, but not really much to compare the consumption to. By comparison my monthly utility bills usually show a bar chart of the last 13 months, so that I can easily compare the current month to the same month last year, etc.
Also, in the one small screen that actually looks like a dashboard (the one with the tiny shadowed world map) - I’d recommend adjusting the spacing in the grouped bar chart so that it has more space between the groups, and less/no space between the bars within a group.
I’ve seen this dashboard in action and a couple of the comments above are completely irrelevant (and pretty naive, these are obviously cropped images of different menu states) — you guys are looking at a static screenshot, but this thing is actually highly interactive and incredibly useful.
Not sure what you guys are talking about, or why discussion board responders are always so critical of things on this site without really understanding what they are critiquing.
“mr tom” is correct though, the audience here definitely IS NOT a technical person monitoring the health of a building, this is for public education, which I think is great and something most BI dashboards simply don’t aim to do.
I agree with the latest comment - some commenters are continually hyper-critical. I am a graphic designer with a couple of dashboard projects under my belt. I can say that the vast majority of users do not understand the subtle differences between the best or second best way to visualize the data, but can tell you instantly if a dashboard looks good or not.
The success of a graphical interface is largely a result of subtle design-type influences. It’s the perception of a good interface that makes a dashboard project a success.
Granted, I understand the need to make sure that the data is not presented in a way that is misleading. BUT - can’t we also have something look good as this particular dashboard does a good job in doing?
Do you have a link to a working example of this building dashboard? I’d love to give it a try and see how the interacive elements work.
Thanks and keep up the great work, Mr. Dashboard Spy!
Sorry if my comments seem to criticize, but I do try to give some concrete suggestions (ie, “constructive criticism”), not just complaints. And I frequently have dashboard programmers actually *thank* me for my suggestions.
If these are just mainly menu-screens, could we get a few screen-captures of the final graphs / dashboards? I’d be interested in seeing those.
Folks - I forgot to post a link to the building dashboard. The one used by the University of Vermont is available at http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/uvm/davis/. Sorry for any confusion that arose as a result.
Robert - Your contributions are always valued. They have always been given sincerely as constructive criticism and are appreciated by the Dashboard Spy community. We also are grateful for the dashboard examples you offer. Thanks.
The Dashboard Spy
Another building dashboard (university of colorado at boulder) can viewed at
http://www.buildingdashboard.com/clients/cuboulder
The Dashboard Spy
Pierre,
I think your response is a little tough - suggesting that people who don’t agree with you don’t understand what they’re talking about is hardly fair, nor is branding such comments “irrelevant” and “naive”.
To date, I think we’ve always kept things “nice” here and I for one would like to see that continue.
When a facility is provided for commentary on content, it is to be expected that some comments will appreciate the work being exhibited, some will point out flaws and some will do a mix of the two (something I generally aim for).
The challenge that has always been present for dashboards is combining accuracy (and unambiguity) with attractive layout. Throw “presenting enough information to facilitate decision making” into the pot and it is easy to see why this is such a difficult task that so any companies face on a daily basis.
Tableau, http://www.tableausoftware.com/ recently reviewed by Stephen Few seem to get it right. They have a clean, attractive interface (without resorting to bling), which provides a lot of accurate data without misleading.
One thing is clear about the people who comment here - we’re generally people who have to build these things and whilst the MD/CEO/CIO may buy a package because it is pretty, we’re then left with the task if implementing it in a way that ensures that the right information is presented to the right people in the right way. Mislead somebody our necks are on the line, so please forgive us if we vote for accuracy above all else and are quick to point out when it is absent.
I hope this comes across as constructive, as I am not seeking to have a go at anybody.
Tom.
Thanks for posting up a link to the live dashboard! I went to the uvm/davis dashboard, and selected the “Green Roof” icon to look at the temperatures:
Green Roof:
surface=123.9, 1-meter above surface=63.2
Conventional Roof:
surface=60.4, 1-meter above surface=62.0
I’m a bit surprised - I would have thought that a conventional-roof (tar/gravel?) would have had the higher surface temperature, and the green-roof (dirt & plants) would have had a cooler surface temperature ???
Anyone got more insight into this? (Or, maybe the numbers have been inadvertantly reversed in the dashboard?)
Here’s a little follow-up …
Per the “suspicious” green roof surface temperature being much higher than the conventional roof, I did use the website’s link to email/contact the people in charge there, and got an automated response that they’d received my email … but it’s been several days, and I still haven’t received any explanation for the suspicious (switched?) numbers.
If I do receive a response, I’ll post it here — in the meantime, I must assume that the numbers are incorrect, which makes this the absolute *worst* kind of dashboard, imho.
By “absolute worst”, I mean … one that is accessable by a large audience on the web, and that has captivating “good looks” (which draws in even more people to look at it), but it has incorrect data. (… and, to top it off, when you report the wrong data, there apparently is nobody listening, and no action to fix, or turn off, the incorrect part of the dashboard).
Robert - thanks for following up with your question to them. I hope they answer because it’s an interesting question.
I did some research on the subject of “heat savings” with a green roof and there is a LOT of material to go through.
Take a look at this link on Green Roofs.