I spent last week at a TSB Sandpit on User Centred Design for Energy Efficiency in Buildings. 5 days with 30 people from academia and industry thinking about how UCD could be used to support energy efficiency in buildings.
We were successful in winning a few projects “Social BMS” and “YouCaretaker”. The former will be a schools based project to map energy / resource use overlaid with socialised data to create “data shadows” which describe continuous real time use of the school environment. The latter is focused on creating an online community to support the sharing of data and best practice amongst stakeholders in the operation of buildings. Both projects have a really interesting mix of partners of which more will follow on the blog once the projects get started. There are still a few hurdles to jump through before kick off (in Sept) but it is supposedly down hill from here.
The event was facilitated extremely well by the guys at Know Innovation (they have a write up on their blog)