The tree's health is decided upon how good you are at preserving household energy

May 1, 2007 19:11 GMT  ·  By

Want to save energy in your home? The EnergyTree concept PC can guide you. This system is supposed to educate you about the need of saving energy.

Ben Arent's concept is all about using energy efficiently in order to keep the tree within the case alive. It's sounds like the Tamagotchi blackmail system: take care of something, or else there's going to be a funeral. Here's the gist of it. The system contains a tiny tree, which requires no conventional maintenance. Good! The tree PC system contains sensors that "communicate" to the electronic devices in your house in order to monitor the energy usage. It can even turn auxiliary devices on and off to keep your energy usage low. So, the tree's health is decided upon how good you are at preserving energy.

If you're extremely efficient at saving energy, the EnergyTree device will give the Bonsai all the nutrients and water it needs to survive. In case you're not good at saving home energy, the system will "poison" the tree. And what do you learn from this, eh? Every time you waste hosehold energy, God kills a kitten! A tree, sorry, God kills a tree! Right.

The UK designer's EnergyTree PC was recently chosen as one of the 34 finalists in the 2007 Microsoft StartSomething design competition. Maybe they should've called it StartSomethingSmart.

Anyway, what kind of environmentally-friendly system is this since it's killing trees softly. Great idea! So, since this system threatens the tree's life, I'm guessing this is probably not targeted at environmentalists. They would probably prefer to kill a human in order to spare the tree. Let's say the tree dies! What if the poor Bonsai reincarnates in a Bull-Terrier and pays you a "courtesy" visit? Thank God this is only a concept!

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .