Eco-Garden: A Data Sculpture to Encourage Sustainable Practices in Everyday Life in Households

Household consumption significantly impacts climate change. Although interventions that make households aware of their consumption exist, tailoring the design to each home’s needs remains challenging. To address this, we developed Eco-Garden, a data sculpture designed to visualise household consumption aiming to promote sustainable practices. Eco-Garden serves as both an aesthetic piece for visitors and a functional tool for household members to understand their resource consumption. In this paper, we present the human-centred design process of Eco-Garden and the preliminary findings we made through the field study. We conducted a field study with 15 households to explore participants’ experience with Eco-Garden and its potential to encourage sustainable practices at home. Our participants provided positive feedback on integrating Eco-Garden into their homes, highlighting considerations such as aesthetics, physicality, calm manner of presenting consumption data. Our Insights contribute to developing data sculptures for households that can facilitate meaningful interactions with consumption data.