Design Studio 2.3

Continuing with the second terms research and interventions. Working with Oliver to further grow our network and understand other peoples viewpoint of energy. 

After our first research project into the tracker and our own perspective of energy, Oliver and I felt the need to reach out to more people and get a better understanding of what others felt was important in the world of energy. Next to this we also aimed to talk to professors and experts to gain new insights into our ideas for our research project. With all these actions we started to create our community of practice and grow our community canvas. 

The Survey

At first Oliver and I were discussing potential ways to further our research through using other people. We eventually want to get people to use our prototype and gain deeper insights from what they feel about this. However for us the first step to understanding what people want/need is to gain a deeper understanding of their current situation. With this in mind we sent out a survey about energy, tracking devices and current issues. Another key question we asked in this survey was the willingness to participate in any further research we might have. This way we created a database of people willing to share their ideas and also a way to go back and learn more from people. In the end we were able to reach 37 people with a variety of backgrounds, ages and cultures. This gives us a very wide perspective but for ourselves we did limit it to people living in the Netherlands, the UK or Spain.  The main findings from the first part of the survey was that there was an even split between people whom track some form of energy in their house and those whom don't. Next to this only 10.8% of the people that responded that they did not contemplate energy a lot, with the majority finding it somewhat to very important.

In the next part of the survey the people who tracked their consumption were asked a series of questions. Here it became clear that heating, electricity, and household expenditures were the most tracked out of all the options. Of this group it was interesting to see that 84% used monitoring devices and 44% used their own bills to track. The main motivations for this group consisted of saving money and environmental consciousness, we expected community to be another factor yet only 1 person responded to find this of importance. Furthermore, when trying to understand current pain points it became clear that the people who do have a problem feel that the information is portrayed unclearly, or the costs/control of the system is an issue.

Of the group that does not currently monitor their consumption, a main block for starting would be the cost of the system (42.1%), followed the information is portrayed currently (21.2%) and the unclarity of the choices that exist (15.8%). It was also interesting to see that the motivation for starting to track usage is the same as the group that is currently tracking. It would be key for our design to aim to work within these two values of environmentally consciousness and budget friendly/allowing people to save money.

Finally, we asked the people for their input on energy and research. This question aimed to gain valuable feedback for the design process. The main feedback received can be divided into the following categories:

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Growing our Community Canvas

Next to working on our survey and understanding the insights from that the next goal was to give a voice to the people who we considered experts and key to our success throughout this project. We talked to various people with an eye on gaining a deeper understanding of what their perspective was on our research. I think the main thing I learned from these interactions were that the personality the design has and the interaction it creates could shift the feeling in many ways. Furthermore Guillem helped us understand that we should after the survey look at ways to interact with even more. Just jump in and design with others it doesn't have to be perfect to get feedback. Throughout the past weeks we took that to heart and also started to create our own community canvas board in which we place people that have given feedback and who we can in the future reach out to again.

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Reflecting and Looking the Future

The action we have taken in the past week for design studio in combination with the results from the micro challenge have pushed us further and given us many ideas on what to do next. Working to create a network of people that we can fall back on and learn from I feel has been great to give a fresh perspective on our design field and what others might be struggling with. The coming weeks Oliver and I are planning on to continue designing with others and test our idea of having a chat with your house. We want to also go into more depth with the people we surveyed and potentially interviewing them so that we can get more input and hear their potential ideas for solutions.

Furthermore when I look at the research we did it was still very much at a surface level. The importance of that was so that we could better understand the very basic issues and then see how we can learn from peoples experiences of them. I think that in the future it would also be interesting to design something that people who said they were open to monitoring their usage could use for a while and then give us input on what works.

Looking at both the survey and the people we talked to I realized that our design field is an interesting combination of people, designs and issues. It is not that all people want to change, but it is so that many would have a potential motivation for switching. On a larger scale it is about realizing how potentially a design can enable people through their own values to make a shift, and how these shifts together can create larger change. 

Finally, I feel that this intervention was really essential for us to understand that community doesn't need to be in the physical sense but can just be the web of connections we have formed throughout this experience. All the people we talk to that give us feedback but that we don't really think as part of the design space actually are one with us. 

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