Fostering the sustainable energy transition through design

Approach

The success of the sustainable energy transition ultimately depends on people—their behavior, values, and willingness to change or collaborate determine its success. While there is extensive knowledge on how to approach the energy transition, solutions are unlikely to be adopted without public support or a clear sense of urgency. Designing an intervention to encourage collaboration around such a complex theme aligns perfectly with our expertise. After all, using social design, we develop solutions tailored to the needs and aspirations of real people living real lives.

For the project ‘Warmlopen in Amersfoort,’ we implemented our full social design cycle. A key step was refining the project objectives through a Problemstorm session: What exactly do we want to achieve, and most importantly, for whom? This session revealed that the implicit learning objective—conveying that collaboration accelerates and improves progress in the energy transition—was considered the most important. More important, in fact, than ensuring residents immediately understood all technical details about sustainable energy transition measures.

Based on these insights, our designers developed several creative concepts. A board game with role-playing elements proved to be the best fit for the project’s goals. Our team then iteratively developed the gameplay, created and tested paper prototypes, and collaborated with energy transition experts to write and validate the content for the game cards.