For the systems design project at National Institute of design we attempt to study a system of our choice, taking into consideration all the intricacies and aspects involved. In return, we have tried to come up with opportunities for design intervention and some solutions for the problems in the system studied. Wicked problems, as the underlying theme of this project, under which we decided to take up India's Energy issue for this ten week long project.
Check out the complete project on the blog https://energysystemsnid.wordpress.com/
While searching for possible wicked problems to take up for our systems project, we came across a proposal by ‘Forum for The Future’ on India’s decentralized energy, which got us interested in energy as a whole. Further research got us acquainted with the ever-increasing use and exploitation of all non-renewable resources, the dire need to switch to greener, low-carbon resources for energy and the lack of awareness about the same.
To determine which factors to base our solutions upon, it was necessary to find out which were the most dynamic factors affecting energy consumption. To achieve this, we mapped all the factors categorized into social, regional, political, economical and technological, and compared each factor against the rest. We tried to see if each factors affected the rest in any way. As a result, the top five dynamic factors were choices, prices of energy, community connectedness, habits and development
A design intervention which targets the aforementioned factors will inevitably affect a series of other factors, creating a ripple effect and causing maximum positive impact on energy consumption. Based on this insight areas of opportunities were mapped out and also multiple design ideas were generated for different levels in the system.
Some ideas under the category of education models like gamifying energy awareness, easy & information cards for salesmen were immediately executed and tried out. Concept cards were created to approach and gain feed-backs from intellectuals of considerable domains.
