Design Council RED - Future Currents, Certification, & Attractiveness
Over the summer I researched and wrote a series of blog entries for the RED group at Design Council in the UK. My work was an experiment to support the RED Energy Project, which is now available at http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/futurecurrents/. Although the RED group was focused on energy efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions, many of their insights are topical for sustainability in general.
I was checking out their Energy Rating design solution, which describes the following situation:
Why aren’t houses labelled for energy efficiency like fridges? Soon houses on the market will be rated as part of the new Home Information Pack but there is still no incentive to take action. If mortgage lenders required borrowers to improve their house’s energy rating, energy performance and running costs would be higher on home-improvers’ agendas. The energy ratings of homes would be publicly displayed on for-sale signs, in estate agents’ windows and on maps on home-buying websites. We could create a situation where it is socially desirable to show that you have a low-energy house.
This is describing a situation in which sellers of a home find it in their best interest to improve and advertise the energy efficiency of their home because the market values that action and information. Again, this essentially describes a linkage between action and communication and transparency and increased value in the marketplace.
I would describe this situation as essentially a consumer to consumer transaction, and essentially deals with a homogeneous social group: a house seller is also a house buyer, and the terms under which they understand and appreciate the increased value is essentially the same. A house seller who makes energy efficiency changes to his home will probably value such changes and look for similar information when buying a new house. Lack of this information will probably prove a point of negotiation between him and the seller of the new house, possibly encouraging the seller to value these changes as well and demand them of the new house they in turn buy. This has a very nice cascading effect amongst the consumer sphere as more homeowners begin to look for or are asked about energy efficiency in the homes they are buying or selling.
The one concern I have is whether adequate certification exists to legitimize the ratings or evaluations. For ratings to be effective, they need to at least use a common language and at best be performed identically with the same criteria and evaluation process. So, for example, a homeowner selling her home can get go through a rating or evaluation process and understanding the steps and criteria involved and can apply this knowledge when looking at the rating of a prospective home. If the rating schemes are different, the homeowner has to re-learn or translate the rating system into the one she is familiar with. An example of this situation is if different foods had different nutrition information labels. There is power from standardization.
The PDF RED Future Currents: Designing for a changing climate report has some interesting points about market transformation:
Market transformation
Market transformation refers to changes in the way markets operate. It involves a combination of labelling appliances of different standards of efficiency, procurement, rebates, minimum standards and education. The biggest effects so far, backed up by European standards, have been seen in the sale of fridges and freezers. The energy consumption of an average 140 litre fridge in the UK home decreased by 29% between 1990 and 2001. European directives are due for other appliances, especially across electronics. The apparent success of energy appliance labelling has led to the labelling of houses, which will become mandatory at the point of sale in the UK in 2007.
However, market transformation also has its limits. The energy efficiency gains have been partially wiped out by people buying larger appliances, or simply more of them – the so-called ‘rebound effect’. In the case of fridges about half the efficiency gains have been lost. This pattern is partly driven by rating schemes themselves, since it is easier for manufacturers to achieve an ‘A’ rating in terms of kWh per litre in larger appliances than in smaller ones. Although they have been keen to develop highly rated products, manufacturers are not interested in selling appliances with lower overall energy consumption per se.
In this case, policy has attempted to drive the market through influencing manufacturers. As with EEC, the Government’s market transformation strategy has achieved some impact, but is ultimately limited as it has not yet engaged householders directly, building awareness of and interest in energy use in appliances. A recent survey by the Association for the Conservation of Energy found that many people with labelled products did not know what the labels meant.
One thing I noticed is the focus on rating products, an approach which I think has some inherent problems (I’ll go into this in another post I’m working on right now). Another important point is that the engagement with consumers regarding labeled products isn’t optimal, reinforcing the importance and need for communicating value to consumers. It’s also not clear to me how the value of energy efficient products is communicated to manufacturers.
Another interesting part of the report:
A number of important design leads came out of our user research:
• The importance of making energy tangible, or visible. This in turn implies a need for information about energy use. Whereas the centralised energy system was intelligent at the centre and did not require the householder to have any feedback on use and the impact of changing behaviour, distributed energy requires information in the home. There is a rich agenda here, taking in home energy rating and going to smart meters, energy statements, control panel, online tools and beyond.
• Design for control – the importance of being able to influence the use of energy across a range of functions and appliances easily and quickly.
• The importance of understanding and appealing to multiple motivations (not just the limited financial version of paybacks). People have complex motivations linking to aspirations, long-term security and their position in relation to others. For example, rather than seeing micro-renewables in terms of an investment whose high capital costs and long payback times currently make them unattractive, the designer might seek to create a new aesthetic for micro-renewables, re-casting them in terms of consumer goods, as the latest must-have purchase. Domestic combined-heat-and-power systems (micro CHP) or photovoltaic panels (PV) have to be objects of desire as well as saving carbon dioxide emissions.
• Collaboration is a potentially valuable force for change. Acting together can save money, as well as allowing the sharing of knowledge and information on service providers. Alone, enthusiasts remain enthusiasts, but as part of an energy collaborative they are a powerful motivating force. The internet is an ideal platform to support such distributed intelligence.
Of these four points, I hadn’t thought of the last one: collaboration. I’m curious to see if there are other methods of or platforms for collaboration besides the usual suggestion of the internet.
I’m definitely concerned with making information relatable to people in terms they can understand or appreciate; tangible design is one possibility. Many factors are invisible with sustainability, such as draw-down in Third World countries, so it becomes an issue of making those connections visible and making them relatable.
I also want to make sure solutions provide means of action in addition to supplying information and promoting understanding. Ideally the vehicle for understanding and means of action can be as close together as possible—perhaps they can even be one and the same. To be clear, this does not necessarily mean a technological solution. Nutrition labels provide education and a platform for action in the supermarket, for example, in that they educate consumers about the nutritional content and provide a basis for choice at the point of sale. The crucial ingredient that may be missing is an understanding of how this information relates to the consumer on a personal, case-by-case basis. That relationship may best be illustrated via technological means because of technology’s ability to adapt and customize information.
I disagree somewhat with the comments regarding motivation, however. I think the aesthetic is important, of course, but just as important is the communication of value. There’s a disjunction between the understanding of how increased energy efficiency affects home value and the motivation for buying something based purely on the “latest must-have purchase.” Yes, people need attractive and desirable things, but not at the cost of the overall certification and valuation process, which must be valued as well.
If people could see how a purchase would increase the value of their homes, for example, that might be one way of counteracting the “high capital costs and long pay back times” listed as being undesirable. This approach might work because people already understand that homes are investments that appreciate over time. So once products are inserted into that time-scale instead of residing within the time-scale of most consumer goods, people can better appreciate the value such changes would generate. That is, if you say a wind-power generator benefits your home value, you can compare such a change against other investments you’d make in your home, such as replacing the shingles or adding insulation. One concern with making something like a wind-power generator sell on the basis of aesthetic is that people may decide to replace it every so often when styles change, which generates waste and inefficiency. Or they may not consider it inherently valuable, possibly even something akin to a pink flamingo on the front lawn.
Inserting the micro-generation solution into the time-scale of the house enables the certification process to perform as intended, with products rated based on their performance and contribution to overall home value, for example, instead of whether it’s red or blue or looks like a rocket ship. The thing to remember is that all of this technology and the benefits it provides can be quantified—we need to differentiate very clearly where aesthetic is important and where function and results should be emphasized. Of course we want things to look nice and be usable, but this is also one of the rare times when evaluations of “good” and “bad” design can actually be justified based on real data. A more effective energy efficiency or energy production solution is “good” compared to less effective solutions, and this fact should not be lost amongst the aesthetics. If we’re talking about changing the market, then along with the aesthetically “attractive” we must also focus on how to make long-term solutions that provide tangible, quantitative results and feedback “attractive.”