Studio Schnettker

Service:

Service Design
Social Research
Facilitation
Art Direction

Project:

Student Service Design
Challenge 2024 (IKEA Brief)

Year:

2023-24

Team:

Agata Kowalska
Emily O’Connor
Ginevra Papi
Julian Nuñez
Linh Kieu Dang
Tim Schnettker

SMARTO – The change starts at home

In Latvia, there is a generalised lack of empowerment among citizens that negatively impacts their ability to take individual actions and make informed decisions towards a sustainable energy transition.

By translating energy consumption into tangible and intuitive daily life experiences, we can empower Kuldīgans to make more informed decisions, save money, and achieve a balance between home comfort and affordable expenses, all while supporting sustainable change.

SMARTO is an educational kit, making energy use tangible and intuitive. It helps people track their consumption, set goals, and receive feedback and actionable tips through clear comparisons and visualisations. Our empowering approach allows people to experience energy firsthand and make informed choices to save money while maintaining a comfortable home.

Scope: service design: secondary and primary research (user interviews, probes), problem definition, ideation, workshop facilitation, prototyping, client presentation

From problem statement
to research plan

What stood out for us from our initial research was the surprising fact that Latvia’s energy consumption remains high despite a shrinking population. Latvia faces a challenge with high household energy consumption, surpassing the EU average in cooking, heating, and water heating.

Nationally, homes lead energy consumption at 29%, beating out transport and industry. In Kuldīga, a significant local issue involves the energy-efficient renovation of historical buildings in the UNESCO Heritage List and the ageing Soviet-era built-ups to lower heat energy costs for both residents and the municipality.

Despite a declining number of households, energy use remains high, revealing a lag in energy-saving efforts. A historical disconnect, stemming from Soviet times when energy was cheap or free, leaves many in the dark about energy sources, suppliers and bills, and sceptical about energy-efficient products. This paradox became our central research goal, driving us to explore the underlying reasons for this disconnect.

Key Learnings:

Sometimes the initial research field is complex in its socio-economic dimensions and it is very helpful to think on different layers of society and create initial research questions for each layer.

Key insights

To gain a deep understanding of local energy use, we conducted in-depth ethnographic research with six households in Kuldīga. These households reflected a diversity in size, composition, education, and employment. Through cultural probes (i.e energy diaries, photos and videos), contextual interviews, and home visits, we explored individual energy behaviours, awareness, perceptions, motivations, and the enablers and blockers they face. This process allowed us to test and validate our assumptions, as well as identify eight key insights for each research question:

Key Learnings:

Visualising the overlapping themes is not only helpful in documenting the process, but also helps the team to better reflect on potential opportunity areas.

Through our contextual interviews and the energy diaries, we identified user behaviour patterns across diverse households. This led to the creation of two archetypes, which are the Consumption Detective and the Knowledge Seeker.

The Consumption Detectives are constantly vigilant about their energy use and proactively take actions to reduce their costs. They particularly favour dynamic electricity pricing plans and meticulously schedule appliance usage based on real-time prices monitored through their energy provider’s mobile app.

The Knowledge Seekers aren’t particularly aware and conscious of their behaviours, routines, and the amount of energy they consume. They prefer the simplicity of fixed-rate electricity plans. Accessing clear information about energy use isn’t easy, leaving them reliant on assumptions and myths for their daily energy habits.

Key Learnings:

Archetypes are a helpful tool in understanding the user, without letting yourself be guided by demographic biases. All information for the archetypes was grounded in our qualitative research.

These insights served as the foundation upon which we crafted How Might We (HMW) questions. After generating a large number of HMWs, we discarded duplicates and refined them to ensure each one targeted specific users, offered a range of potential solutions, focused on a desired outcome, and used positive phrasing.

Through affinity clustering, we identified recurring themes and mapped their relationships, in which two themes emerged as particularly strong and overlapping, which are the intangibility of energy and its consumption, and limited awareness of the impact of daily actions and habits on consumption. These overlapping themes highlight core challenges: a difficulty in understanding energy use and a lack of connection to consumption behaviour.

From challenges to
opportunities

With a focus on opportunity creation, we explored ‘What If’ scenarios for our top 2 HMW questions by using divergent and convergent thinking methods and affinity mapping, all while considering our research findings and our two behaviour-based archetypes.

Key Learnings:

Phrasing HMW is never easy. Take your time and really be picky about every word. This process can sometimes become frustrating but it is worth to work through it.

(1) HMW make energy consumption more tangible for Knowledge Seekers so that they can get a better understanding and control over their energy-related decisions?

What if technology could allow people to experience (i.e. see, feel, hear or sense) their energy consumption
What if play was used as a tool to educate and promote energy saving behaviour?
What if people could experience (i.e. see, feel, hear, or sense) how their energy-related choices impact the beautiful Latvian nature and landscapes they treasure?

(2) HMW assist Knowledge Seekers and Consumption Detectives in achieving a cosy living environment while minimising energy expenses?

What if homes and living spaces could take care of themselves and adapt to people’s needs to ensure comfort while minimising energy waste?
What if we could recreate the feeling of cosy contentment, warmth, and comfort using less energy?

Ideation

From board games to virtual reality, and from monitoring systems to energy cafés, we explored various options. Our initial prototype and testing focused on a smart kitchen appliance rental subscription service. We learnt that (1) people aren’t open to rent appliances, (2) they want to know the specific energy consumption of each appliance, (3) comparisons are more effective than detailed numerical data, (4) practical steps and tips help people take control, and (5) savings and impacts are more meaningful when framed in the context of the user’s home or local community.

Smarto, a smart energy kit

Saving money, maintaining home comfort, and doing the right thing should be easy and go hand-in-hand. With Smarto, this is possible! It is people-centric, societyoriented, experience-based, technologyenabled, and circular and sustainable.

Read the Concept of Smarto ↗

See its Business Model Canvas ↗

Check its Service Blueprint ↗

View our six-month progress ↗

SMARTO – The change starts at home

Scope: service design: secondary and primary research (user interviews, probes), problem definition, ideation, workshop facilitation, prototyping, client presentation

Service:

Service Design
Social Research
Facilitation
Art Direction

Project:

Student Service Design
Challenge 2024 (IKEA Brief)

Year:

2023-24

Team:

Agata Kowalska
Emily O’Connor
Ginevra Papi
Julian Nuñez
Linh Kieu Dang
Tim Schnettker

From problem statement
to research plan

Key insights

From challenges to
opportunities

(1) HMW make energy consumption more tangible for Knowledge Seekers so that they can get a better understanding and control over their energy-related decisions?

What if technology could allow people to experience (i.e. see, feel, hear or sense) their energy consumption
What if play was used as a tool to educate and promote energy saving behaviour?
What if people could experience (i.e. see, feel, hear, or sense) how their energy-related choices impact the beautiful Latvian nature and landscapes they treasure?

(2) HMW assist Knowledge Seekers and Consumption Detectives in achieving a cosy living environment while minimising energy expenses?

What if homes and living spaces could take care of themselves and adapt to people’s needs to ensure comfort while minimising energy waste?
What if we could recreate the feeling of cosy contentment, warmth, and comfort using less energy?

Ideation

Smarto, a smart energy kit

Read the Concept of Smarto ↗

See its Business Model Canvas ↗

Check its Service Blueprint ↗

View our six-month progress ↗

SMARTO – The change starts at home

From problem statementto research plan

Key insights

SMARTO – The change starts at home

From problem statementto research plan

Key insights

←

From problem statement
to research plan

From problem statement
to research plan