All posts filed under “Energy”
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Environments Studio: Design, Behavior and Social Interaction
Jasper Tom investigated patterns of people’s behavior in Pittsburgh’s Greyhound Bus Station In this short introductory unit, we looked at ways in which the design of environments, and features within them, affects people’s behavior and interaction with each other. Design influences what people do, but […]
Environments Studio: Materializing the Invisible
In Materializing the Invisible, we considered invisible and intangible phenomena—the systems, constructs, relationships, infrastructures, backends and other entities, physical and conceptual, which comprise or influence much of our experience of, and interaction with, environments both physical and digital. ‘The invisible’ here is potentially everything from […]
Thinking About Things That Think About How We Think
We often hear the phrase ‘intelligent environments’ used to describe spaces in which technology is embedded, in the form of sensors, displays, and computational ability. This might be related to Internet of Things, conversational interfaces or emerging forms of artificial intelligence. But what does ‘intelligence’ […]