New Project Launched – Measuring Water Reclamation, One Flush At a Time
Green Projects are everywhere. Infrastructure, industry, and of course interactive exhibits. The company I work for recently launched a very cool installation at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago that has a green focus, but with a bit of a twist. You see, they installed a water reclamation processing system in one of the high traffic restrooms at the museum. This facility takes the water flushed washed down the sink, cleans it, making it “grey water“. This grey water can then be used in the toilets. This conserves a massive amount of water. here’s where we come in.
The bathroom is touchless. The Sloan brand sinks, toliets and urinals (yes, now my blog has the word “urinal” in it, twice, even) are all automatic. In addition, the urinals are of the “waterless” variety. The hand dryers are those cool Dyson airblade ones. All of these devices report to a central server tracking usage. That’s right… the toilets let the server know how many flushes happen, the sinks report the water usage, etc.
We built an interactive presentation that taps into this data via a webservice. The data is then overlaid on some fantastic HD footage of water doing watery things. Washing up on beaches, splashing, gurgling, being water. We used Flash’s H.264 support to its fullest, displayed on 120hz 1080p displays. Looks great. On specified intervals, the metrics are updated, letting viewer know about the environmental impact they are making by using this facility.
Take a look at a couple images (I apologize for the photo quality, they were shot by my iPhone in some low light conditions)… Click on em to see the full size version.
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The second image has some data on the display… This image was shot at about 10AM, and the facility had already saved 114 gallons that day! Cool. It states there that the current average savings is 2031 gallons per day. Woot! Now that’s some cool data you can use. All built in flash by The Iona Group. Erik Peterson was the primary developer. He’s on Twitter. You should follow him if you like pithy comments and electric pineapples (I don’t know what they are either). Heather Ford was the primary designer. Follow her on Twitter, too. She does good work.
What a fun project. A great client too.
Posted on February 3, 2009
Matt Feb 3
This is really interesting. Might just have to make a trip to the museum to check this out. Nice work Ionaions.
Chris Free Feb 3
What an awesome project. I would love to work on a project like this! Does the installation aggregate year to date data as well? Those Dyson hand dryers are cooler than their vacuums.
science of identity foundation Feb 4
That’s great! I’ve always been very interested in the use of grey water – it just makes sense . Props to you guys and the museum for the great project. I’d love to check it out if I ever head that way.
@ Chris Free – thanks, I was just about to ask if that’s the same Dyson that makes the vacuums.
Jim Feb 4
Nice post, i like how you can show people that in little ways we can conserve a lot of natural resources.
Alan Mar 1
Nice article. I think ‘Green’ and eco is the way to go in the future. Unless we want Earth to become a wasteland in the future.