Nesta’s clean heat neighbourhood work is exploring how households engage with and respond to the idea of a coordinated clean heat transition within their local area. The project aims to understand how people react to their area being set in a clear direction for clean heat. One of the key questions this project seeks to address is:
“If we communicate future home heating options to residents, how will they respond?”
We took a design-led, iterative approach: prototyping, testing and refining what clean heat neighbourhoods could look and feel like from a household’s point of view. Our goal is to uncover what works for households and to refine the tools and methods that could improve their clarity, confidence and actions around heating choices.
Why did we do this?
This work builds on our previous testing, and work with BIT, which looked to understand whether clear direction and understanding of the low-carbon transition can help households make more informed decisions about their heating options and ease the process of adopting low-carbon technologies in their homes.
Through qualitative research, we heard a strong need for wider direction-setting – people were unsure why they’d been contacted or how this related to a broader plan. We also heard that even though social reinforcement may build confidence in the scheme, individual agency must be stressed – people expressed the need for a balance of convenience in coordination, while still maintaining the ability to have their own say.
Lastly, we saw the importance of building trust in the technology itself – people want to understand what it is and how it works. There is a need for the proposed technologies to feel more familiar, especially compared to more traditional heating systems, such as boilers.
To test some of our understanding from the previous phase, we focused this round of testing on three core questions:
- How do we build confidence in clean heat neighbourhoods, and that an area-based transition is going to happen?
- How can we understand household preferences around what is collective and what is individual in a clean heat neighbourhood process?
- How do we communicate information about the technology proposed for each home in a way that builds confidence?
