At the beginning of June, Strategic Design Scenarios, the Belgian partner of the ECO2 project, organized the ACT4ECO Design Jam with the aim of coming up with innovative and sustainability-oriented solutions to reduce energy consumption in the home.
The workshop focused on 5 main design challenges which were clusters of 176 user quotes collected during the project.
15 design concepts emerged from this workshop, solutions that mainly address behavior change. Among the concepts, most of them outlined some design guidelines for energy conscious design formulated as recommendations for industry and other stakeholders in the energy sector. Here are a few examples:
- Implement functionalities in products to make sure they’re not too easy to use (to limit over-consumption…).
- Make device maintenance tasks easy to do and to remember
- Make consumption level visible for each activity or appliance used (amount of water used, color changing with temperature… rather than displaying meters)
- While communicating, prefer fun and originality rather than guilt tripping
- Focus on the transition period rather than on an ideal sustainable society.
A more complete information about the concepts and a list of recommendations will be shared in a Catalogue that’ll be published in our website in August.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to selam@strategicdesignscenarios.net for more details about the Design Jam.