Social Computing for Sustainability

During second half of February we had our first industry projects. We could choose between working with danish public transport company DSB or Digital Home Group from Intel Corp. The first one was service design oriented while the second one more technology focused so I went for Intel.

This course was meant to simulate working with a real client so we have a representative from Intel : Jay Melican. He introduced us into his background and told a bit about his work. There was a lot about sustainability and power management, especially about Smart Grids and future of household devices and appliance.

We started by doing some background research. Everybody was asked to look in the internet for ideas about sustainability, green energy and technology. Next day we printed what we’ve found, put it on the wall and presented to the rest of the pilot year.

During first days we very quickly stared brainstorming around this topics. We learned some techniques like trying to came up with as many ideas as possible in a limited amount of time. We were given a keyword and 2 minutes to sketch ideas about sustainability. Then we were picking topics that emerged from our ideas, rephrasing them and developing new ones.

Then we sorted our ideas into three groups : products/services, metaphors and other that doesn’t fit to the first two. I especially like this about polar bear that is used so much when talking about climate change. Imagine if you could be like this bear whose icebergs are shrinking. What if your bed was shrinking too if you use too much energy

Then we did one day user research asking our neighbors and friends about their knowledge about sustainability and energy management. Based on that we formed some research question and discussed them.

In this project I worked with Nina and our final question was:

How can we show long term impact of individual actions now?

Our last task for this week was to brainstorm about this question. This was real fun! We sketches about 80 ideas in 3 hours making the tallest idea wall ever