The Future of a Sustainable Sharing Economy - w. 46

What we have done

At the beginning of this week we realized that there is not too much time left until the final presentation. Therefore we made a detailed project plan with deadlines for each part; presentation, report and the prototype.

Since the previous week report we have taken into account the comments from the mid-crit and developed the idea with them in mind. First of all, we have discussed how to make our concept more challenging and futuristic as we got criticism saying that our idea could be realized in a foreseeable future.

We produced the material for the website, a text and a picture explaining our project. Since we are happy with our project name, Shenergy, we decided to stick with it.

We had a meeting with Hanna Hasselqvist who works with an EU-project that concerns electric commons. To prepare for the meeting we read up on the project on their website (http://www.civisproject.eu) and came up with relevant questions to ask. At the meeting we got some inspiration for a background story that we will work further on. Our background story will probably be based on a scenario where Sweden has experienced a collapse or is preparing for a collapse.  

What we will do

From now on, we will put focus on and decide what kind of presentation we want to do. In order to make our concept more interesting we believe it is important to localize the scenario (eg to Stockholm) and make it more extreme and futuristic. Also, we have to focus on what is actually fun to hear about in the final presentation. Probably it is not that interesting to listen to a list of tech development, but rather to see the visualization of user scenarios and personas, including a walk through of the application. Therefore, we have to put some effort on how to design for smart energy in everyday life scenarios. To do that professionally, we have to do some research and have deeper discussions about the visualization of data. One idea of how to present the concept is by telling a story about the energy production and consumption from today to the future, and thereby state why our concept will be better in the future. The last issue to decide on is whether we should apply a global approach to our concept for the future, or not. It could be an interesting approach in order to make the future scenario more futuristic and extreme.

Challenges encountered

One challenge is to decide on how to make Shenergy even more futuristic and challenging. Also, we have to find ways to approach the idea in a interesting and encouraging way. Since energy is hard to see with the naked eye, we have to come up with a clear and easy way for people to understand what energy is, how it is produced and how it is consumed. It has shown to be quite tricky to decide on what is the best way to do so.

Changes in the project

The main change in our project is that we are focusing more on the future and leaving out how it looks today.

Resources

http://www.civisproject.eu
www.egenel.etc.se
http://studiolab.ide.tudelft.nl/studiolab/singh/research/