Our group is called JEPP – Jesmond Energy Co-Production Platform.
Members: Crystal, Conrad, Rob, Chris and Brandon
Members of JEPP met with the client Tony Waterson of the Jesmond Residents Association on Thursday 6th October. Initial discussions with the client involved …
It was established that the team should approach the project by setting goals. The goals were discussed as follows:
- To improve JEPP’s understanding of renewable energy principles and current technology systems, which include solar power and our platform of an energy dashboard regarding its role and ability in reaching the target audience.
- To discuss the role that energy has as a resource to the target users in the locality of Jesmond.
- To look into what is considered viable to the interest groups and what is not.
- To foster a shared ownership of energy at neighbourhood level similar to those principles of energy co-operatives.
But ultimately,
we want to support residents, organisations and businesses in Jesmond in adopting a more energy efficient approach to their current consumption patterns.
Stakeholders
We have discussed about stakeholders with our client and decided business owners are the biggest stakeholders since they uses a lot of energy compare to other stakeholders – according to our client. After that, there are less important stakeholders such as, elderly and retired people living in Jesmond, young professionals and organisation based in public buildings, since they’re the ones who’ll use the energy dashboard.
However, the stakeholders are afraid of installing solar panels. They’re scared about the price of installing solar panels. If that’s the case, they need to be communicated in order to make them notice the importance of renewable energy and the message of using renewable energy can actually save them money in the long term. Then we’ve discussed about ways to communicate with them.
Advertising and publicity
We talked about ways of publicising the JEPP project:
- We need to promote the JEPP project
- Find out more about the Jesmond Residents’ Association
- Have a forum to gather communitiy opinions and level of interest
- Design an engaging email to send out to possible stakeholders
- Deliver a message – the importance of renewable energy
- See if we can use exisiting ways of advertising information to the local community ( e.g. through a display at the Library or by asking if we can have an advert on a school newsletter)
Hi. Very good start on your first blog post and especially your main project goal is very clear and should give ample of focus for your project… I cannot see a set of questions you wish to explore through your design concept though, so perhaps think of this and come up with a set of questions, perhaps “would better visibility of renewable energy projects raise levels of awareness and adoption?”
I think you have made a good start at identifying key user audiences. Remember, for the start your project is focused on the Jesmond area. So do go in and have a little look at local statistics, start devising perhaps a mapping of the area with key initiatives. You could even start doing this by using a google map to capture various projects around the area that are of relevance, or even solar panel installations if this makes sense. Then also have a little think about the audiences… You identify businesses, yes. There are also students there of course. If its about involvement in sustainability projects, they may be a target audiences; however, if you think about those that may make investment choices for sustainable energy, it may be more likely to be home owners and local residents. So have a little think about this and use your user interviews to flesh key audiences out further…
As for the next steps, advertising and publicity, consider those as part of your concept design, research ways how your project may be advertised, but don’t worry about having to do this in practice as part of the module. The key point is to come up with a service/app concept / proposition. So the advertising and awareness raising is a key concern of the user journey (how would local audiences find out about your project?) and then you would use this knowledge once you start working on the designs for your prototype.
Well done and good luck for your user interview tomorrow.