At the end of September, five householders from London and beyond worked together with five designers from the RCA’s Service Design department and Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, participating in a SusLab co-creation workshop at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in Kensington.

Our aim with the workshop was to connect a talented set of designers with some of the householders who have taken part in our ethnographic research, in order to explore further their needs and perspectives around home energy use, and help develop new approaches which reflect more closely the realities of everyday life.

The workshop progressed through exercises exploring the ‘character’ of household appliances and possible improvements and refinements to existing and proposed ways of visualising and managing energy use, culminating with participants creating their own briefs for new systems which they would find useful, given the contexts of how they make decisions about energy use. It’s too early to reveal the details, but there are some exciting ideas.

These briefs, developed and synthesised, will be taken forward to the next stage of the project: a Home Energy Hackday, to take place on 9 November, where we hope they can be explored, challenged, and prototyped. We’ll post full details here as soon as we can.

Many thanks to all our householders for their time and enthusiasm, and also to Irene, Magda, Amy, Carolyn and Paulina for taking part.