Leap day in the TEDActive Urbanization Project has been all about looking forward. We took the four barriers to saving energy identified yesterday and used them to explore what solutions will help overcoming them in the next years. We synthesized all the answers in this graph on the wall of the project space:
And in the following delicious page
www.delicious.com/activeurban
Certainly the TED Talks have continued being a source of inspiration for the project, both in the morning session ‘Earth’ that touched on energy generation and security, and obviously in the last session ‘Cities’, where the mayor of Rio de Janeiro Eduardo Paes’ first commandment for Urbanization was ‘A city of the future has to be environmentally friendly’
Working with a group of 12 Tedsters with diverse backgrounds, from a low-cost home builder in Kenya to a public education strategist for Chicago, we took over lunchtime with a brainstorm exercise, where we turned the inspiration from our two broad questions of the day (hurdles and solutions) into more concise questions designed to come up with quick answers and build on each other’s ideas
1. How can we make energy and energy sources visible?
Much of our consumption revolves around our inability to understand how much energy we are actually using in the moment we are using it and create a thirst for people to want that data so more technologies offer that transparency by default. We can also play off of the idea of smart grids to forecast peak consumption and help people make timely choices about when might be best to run their dishwasher, for instance.
2. How can we make energy management and generation more accessible?
A city’s greatest asset is its people. We need to empower them to be a part of the solution by making clean energy production through more accessible understanding of technology and business models to finance it. We need to find ways to offer the tools to consumers to be a part of the solution, and even profit from it, new incentives will be born.
3. How can we make citizens feel proud of saving energy?
One of the biggest hurdles for saving that came out of yesterday’s session was ‘life’: day to day issues, or indulgent moments that get on the way of being more efficient. On the other hand, people who told us about significant energy savings and energy generation systems had all the common characteristic of being were extremely proud about it. So we wanted to explore how pride in the achievements can be a design principle for a new generation of solutions that can achieve wider appeal.
The ideas from the group were a mix of incremental and revolutionary ideas. The team explored the concept of a social smart meter that is able to inform users in real time of what source of energy is powering their houses, can benefit from a variable pricing model, and can also forecast energy prices for the following hours. Another interesting area was Art. Using art installations that make visible energy sources and energy consumption for the community/city was seen as a great tool for awareness and engagement. More revolutionary, the team discussed the idea of radical low impact-economic housing, that could be extremely interesting in cities in great expansion (as we have learned 60 million people move into cities each year in developing countries). By applying latest technology in house building and energy generation, we could develop communities that ensure quality standards of life with low impact of cost and carbon, making them accessible to newcomers with business models that could be borrowed from microfinance experiences.
This is how the longer list of ideas look:
Thursday will be dedicated to keep thinking on these ideas and see how they can be activated during the conference, and beyond!
Your Urban Team,
Evan, Jenna, Luis
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