Seattle Building Energy Dashboard

New Clean Building Performance standard section

Client: City of Seattle

See This Project | All Projects for Client

For several years, the City of Seattle had been working with Stamen Design on a building energy dashboard, but Stamen wasn't available to make critical updates and improvements to the system. GreenInfo was able to come in, learn the codebase and then rapidly design and deploy an extensive redesign of the single-building report, reducing visual complexity while adding substantial new content to help Seattle achieve its ambitious goals for building electrification and reduction of fossil fuel use.

After a brief handoff from Stamen, we worked directly with the Seattle team to understand the needs related to a new Washington State Clean Building Performance Standard, as well as other accumulated requests for changes to the main Building Report, which hadn't been revised in several years.

Our goal was to maintain the overall look and feel and design language, while making the report both more compact and a bit simpler to read. We introduced new headline cards, with simple up and down arrows and icons to help convey an immediate sense of how the building compares to other similar buildings. To support the new statewide building performance standard, we developed a simple, clear horizontal bar chart that shows where a building currently stands relative to its energy use target, and shift colors if the building is meeting or exceeding that target.

The system is built as a client-side application using Backbone. Data is drawn from tables hosted on Carto.com. The application also uses building outlines in some close zooms, and we improved building outline coverage substantially by importing updated building outlines, manually tracing missing buildings, and improving the methods by which building energy records and outlines are matched together.

Services: Interactive Solutions, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Website Design

“ We’ve got a lot of complements on the additions and updates to the building reports. Thanks again for pulling off this project on a short notice and with a quick turnaround!”

— Terry Sullivan, Energy Benchmarking & Tune-Ups Program Associate

Project Years: 2021

GreenInfo Network

Seattle Building Energy Dashboard

GreenInfo Network