Prosumy

Project description

Design an interactive website that enables citizens who are interested in energy self-consumption to access information in topics unclear to them in order to achieve their needs and future goals concerning their potential investment.

Context

Energy transitions are driven by active participation of citizens in a variety of roles and functions, such as changing their diets and consumption habits towards environmentally friendly options. This project focuses on energy self-consumption of citizens. The self-consumption of energy locally produced by solar panels etc., can lead variable renewable energy sources to be incorporated into the grid. The scale-up of self-consumption, however, faces societal challenges such as technical obstacles of grid management and taxation. Cooperation amongst stakeholders involved in the self-consumption dynamic, ranging from renewable energy communities, prosumers, to government, would address the challenges.

Results

In the end, we managed to create a user tested prototype in form of an interactive website. We also created a concept book. This book includes our research findings, the experience of our product and advice for continuation on this project.

About the project group

We are a group of five students, three following media design, and two software students. We did this project over a duration of 10 weeks, following the Scrum methodology. The topic was new to all of us. We started off the project by doing research about the topic and the client needs. After we gathered information, we started to work out our ideas. At the end we created a prototype which we validated through testing with our end users.