Half of all the energy consumed by human beings is used in or by buildings - but for the most part invisibly. David Vogt at Kondra Systems designed a system to make the invisible visible and display the power used cumulatively by devices such as microwaves, toaster and coffee makers. Vogt's charts tell you whether it it really makes a difference if you turn all those lights - but his project leads straight to another design challenge: how to deploy these representations in such a way that they change behaviour rather than just add to visual overload. Thousands of affective representations of complex phenomena are entering our world. Physicists illustrate quarks. Biologists map the genome. Doctors represent immune systems in the body. Network designers map communication flows in buildings. Managers chart the locations of expertise in their organizations. (Excellent blogs now monitor the best new examples - among them Information Aesthetics, Worldchanging, and Futurefeeder). The too-much-visualization dilemma is put into historical context in Luis Fernández-Galiano's book 'Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy'. Visualizations of complex phenomena can attract attention, he explains, but it requires the development of a shared vision of where we want to be to make visualztions meaningful to us. [Via Doors of Perception Feed]