The student team of RWTH Aachen University competed in the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe.

The aim of the competition is to develop sustainable living concepts for the future. The Counter Entropy house was made from recycled materials, such as wood from the old Tivoli football stadium in Aachen, Germany. The building was designed as a so-called energy+ house, meaning that over a day, it produces more energy than it consumes.

As such a house contains a large number of technical systems, such as photovoltaics, cooling, heating, automated window blinds, configurable lighting, etc. providing a usable interface to the people living in the house is essential. I supervised the student group that developed the energy monitoring interfaces, and the centralized app to control the automated home from an iPad.

Project Website: solar.arch.rwth-aachen.de

Counter Entropy youTube Channel

flickr Photos

• F. Heller, K. Tsoleridis, and J. Borchers, “Counter Entropy: Visualizing Power Consumption in an Energy+ House,” in CHI ’13: Extended Abstracts of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{heller2013a,
  author = {Florian Heller and Konstantinos Tsoleridis and Jan Borchers},
  booktitle = {CHI '13: Extended Abstracts of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  document_type = {InProceedings},
  doi = {10.1145/2468356.2468771},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-1952-2},
  month = {April},
  pdf = {http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/materials/publications/heller2013a.pdf},
  project = {counterEntropy},
  timestamp = {20130427},
  title = {Counter Entropy: Visualizing Power Consumption in an Energy+ House},
  year = {2013},
  bdsk-url-1 = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468771}}