The three instruments you hear here represent the electricity use of three items of office infrastructure – the kettle, a laser printer, and a gang socket for a row of desks – in the Helen Hamlyn Centre office over 12 hours from midnight on a […]
All posts filed under “Energy”
Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research: DRS 2014 Workshop, 15 June 2014
On 15 June, at the 2014 Design Research Society conference in Umeå, Sweden, we will be running a workshop on Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research along with SusLab project colleagues from Chalmers University of Technology and the Wuppertal Institute. This full-day workshop should be of interest to designers and researchers working at intersections […]
Guest post at Ethnography Matters
Over at the excellent Ethnography Matters we have an invited guest post about SusLab, explaining the RCA’s work on the project so far through from an ethnographic perspective. From the conclusion: …we hope to demonstrate, in the context of the wider political, academic and commercial debate over energy and behaviour change, what it means to […]
What’s the future of the UK’s energy? 12 February
On Wednesday, 12 February, we’ll be presenting our work on SusLab so far as part of What’s the future of the UK’s energy?, the next event in the RCA’s Sustain talks series, alongside some big names in sustainability policy and design. By 2050, we could get all the energy we want from safe and clean […]
Home Energy Hackday: the results
On Saturday 9th November, about 35 designers, developers, makers, researchers and other interesting people came together at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. We had everyone from energy startups to service designers, venture capital to building performance and energy consultants, along with participants from our SusLabNWE partner organisations, Chalmers (Gothenburg) and Imperial College London. (Full list […]
Seeing Things: The projects
Visualising invisible patterns in human behaviours and environmental conditions Go straight to the projects On Friday 1 November, in the Senior Common Room at the Royal College of Art, twenty students from twelve different courses presented the outcomes of their week-long Seeing Things projects to invited guests, including participants in other AcrossRCA projects run by […]
Mental Models and Imagining Energy
Written for the CarbonCulture blog Imagine how energy flows… You might think of something like a bolt of lightning, or visualise a glowing power cable. The visible glowing of lighting—at home, at work, and in our streets—is indeed a major use of energy, but in […]
Some Aspects of Energy Literacy
Written for the CarbonCulture blog It’s a concept really, a convenient way of quantifying the ability of different things to ‘do work’ in various ways. It allows gas, oil, coal, solar, and many other sources of converting and storing energy to be described in terms […]
Why We Use Participatory Design
Written for the CarbonCulture blog Designing with the user We’ve taken the view that any approach to behaviour change needs to be done in a human-centred, participatory way: designed with the people who are going to be using the systems we design, rather than remotely. […]
Design Approaches to Behaviour Change
Written for the CarbonCulture blog How users use, and what we can do As the technology we use becomes more efficient, our own behaviour is often the ‘weak link’ environmentally, both at a societal level and at the scale of our everyday interaction with products […]