Had it not been for the Royal College of Arts (RCA) alumni network, Greta Corke, Jon Sawdon Smith and Richard Woods may not have seen their shared passion for the environment blossom into a commercial enterprise.

The three MA graduates were drawn together in 2004 by an exhibition at the V&A, where Corke was collaborating on an energy installation, when the RCA grapevine named Woods as a possible source of technical expertise, who in turn introduced Sawdon Smith to the fold.

Forging an instant rapport, the three set up DIY Kyoto and started developing their first product idea, Wattson, a monitor that displays average domestic electricity usage as an annual cost or by colour – purple for average, blue below average and red above average – or a combination of the two. The company says that the unit will help to cut your electricity bill by between 5 per cent and 20 per cent.

“The idea was that Wattson had a presence through the design element, so that as an object you would like to keep it in your lounge. So you could have it as an intelligent mood light,” Corke says.

The idea led the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to invest £35,000 in the company. With a communications software package developed, inevitably called Holmes, that allows tariff setting and retrieval and analysis of electricity usage data from the display unit, a limited edition was launched in 2006. A year later, a production model was ready for market. The company expects to break even within three years and has moved production to the Far East, reducing unit costs by more than a third – a saving that will be passed on to the customer in the near future.

“It’s quite rare to get a product that works ethically as well as looking nice. Most stuff that tries hard to be worthy is, you know, pretty ugly,” Woods says, and he has a point.

www.diykyoto.com

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