People are more likely to conserve energy if it’s easy to do. Knowing this, students working on Stanford’s entry in the Solar Decathlon green-building competition have redesigned household mainstays to make reducing energy and water consumption a cinch.

When Stanford students began designing their entry, they wanted to do two things: Make the most energy-efficient house possible, and encourage people to make conscious decisions about their energy consumption. That’s why when you switch off the light in the Start.Home, you do so by swiping your fingers across a glowing touch pad.

The redesigned light switch was born from a brainstorming session on how to eliminate excess energy consumption throughout the house. The students zeroed in on two common culprits: people leaving lights on in empty rooms, and so-called vampire power, the small amount of electricity that electronics pull from the socket even when they’ve been switched “off.”

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