Hosted by the always engaging Allan Chochinov of Core77 and featuring judges Jill Fehrenbacher, Saul Griffith, and Jeff Kapec, this year’s competition showcased a wide array of innovative technologies that ranged from the practical to the futuristic to the patently bizarre. Many of this year’s winning designs spoke to one of the central themes of the conference – visualizing energy use.

This year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition challenged an international community of designers and inventors to address issues of product lifecycle, energy use, and sustainability in consumer electronics. We were thoroughly impressed with the ingenuity on display, and Allan started the session off by walking the audience through some of the more notable entries, including the RITI Coffee Ground Printer, several Cardboard Computers, and the Environmental Traffic Light.

There were also some hilarious off-the wall ideas on display, such as the sexy piezoelectric energy-generating “Jiggly Bed” (drawing energy from motion happening on top of the bed), and a literal take on the ‘tail light’, a kinetically-charged light for your dog’s tail to ensure that your dog ‘sparkles’ at night (we know you are all losing sleep at night over the issue of not having a glow-in-the-dark sparkly dog)

After much deliberation the panel settled upon four top entries. The Power Hog was a favorite among the audience and judges alike, Tweet-A-Watt got big kudos Saul and Jill, and the Indoor Drying Rack garnered appeal among the judges for its anti-gadget utility, although the crowd was fiercely divided so the judges decided to include the Laundry Pod as well.

Then it was up to the audience to choose their favorite design, and Allan’s applause-o-meter (measuring the audience claps) awarded the Tweet-A-Watt with the grand prize of $3000!

One of the recurrent points echoed throughout the conference is that we need to be able to measure our energy use before we’re able to cut it down – an issue that the Tweet-A-Watt tackles with flying colors. This open-source power meter won big points for its novel ability to broadcast your home’s energy use through Twitter, encouraging energy conservation by publicly displaying your power consumption. It also represents an innovative diy approach to consumer electronics, and a working model can easily be constructed using readily available materials. Congratulations to Limor Fried, Adafruit Industries, and Phillip Torrone for winning the grand prize, and all of the other teams for their fantastic entries! Check out more photos of the competition at our Greener Gadgets Photo Gallery >

Second place: Powerhog
Third place: Indoor Drying Rack
Fourth place: Laundry Pod

+ 2009 Greener Gadgets Design Competition

+ Greener Gadgets LiveBlog

Image via Dwell

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