I approach this week keen to find an angle that graphic design can have impact with. I explore education around fuel poverty and renewable energy, and innovative educational systems in the modern world.
I redefine the problem as a need for engaging educational resources and I jump into ideating around a 3D virtual world to teach people about energy use around the home. To aid with ideation, I revisit design awards like D&AD to gain a greater sense of award-winning contemporary work, especially in the digital realm.
I'm stopped in my tracks, though, as I begin to ask design questions and can't identify a clear target audience. Despite it being difficult, I have to let go of the idea to explore more meaningful solutions.
This week I take a look at the work of Trouble Maker.
Trouble Maker are an edgy advertising agency that bring a lot of fun and energy to the industry. They stand out because they successfully create visual and emotional appeal to younger and older audiences.
This agency demonstrates that it's ok to inject personality into professional work. In fact, where it's done expertly, it can really enhance a design product. I will take this lesson with me as I go forward.
I took a few steps back to re-examine the barriers I’d previously identified (see 12). Limited education on renewable energy was one, and I started to think that education on energy use could also be lacking. I wondered if I could design an educational tool that would simultaneously teach people how to lower their bills and how renewables work / could work for them.
My research led me to think about and discover virtual worlds design to teach people about energy use and environmental issues.
One such game was Powersaver Game, designed by Jan-Dirk Fijnheer of Universiteit Utrecht. This game was particularly interesting because it was used in a research context to explore its impact.
Another game I found aimed at a young audience was the Power Kid Decarbonisation Journey app by CLP Power (Hong Kong). The app is replete with colouring sheets, net neutrality mini-games, stories, cartoons, and a board game.
I also returned to a trip I’d made to the UK’s Science Museum last year. The museum had a temporary installation call Atmosphere occupying an entire floor.
The installation was entirely game based, with games aimed at teaching about running a carbon neutral city to a very popular mini-car driving game focussed on eliminating non-renewable energy sources and replacing them with renewables.
The combined popularity and impact of the games I’d found encouraged me to believe that there was good potential for an educational tool of this nature, and led me to redefine the problem.
I found a few energy use calculators that already exist, although graphically they were all very basic and not particularly engaging. The aptly name Energy Use Calculator for example has a lot of text and some basic input boxes. RapidTables' calculator is pretty much the same. This suggested scope for something that was a bit more interesting.
If many resources existed to help people understand how to reduce energy and how renewables could benefit them, but people still seemed to be struggling with these things, I reasoned that the problem may be one of how engaging and easy to understand the existing resources may be.
My solution, therefore, should aim to be highly engaging and very easy to understand.
I re-visited the D&AD Awards to get some inspiration as well as a sense of award-winning digital designs. There were a number of great projects I looked at, but none that I felt could directly give some direction to my own project.
I started thinking about challenging what a website can be. We’re used to 2D websites, with an almost standardised system of links and scrollable content. Moving beyond two dimensions seemed a natural way to push beyond the literal, established boundaries of websites. For this reason, I wanted to investigate contemporary, award-winning 3D websites, and Googled just that. I discovered a link to AWWWARDS: design awards similar in nature to D&AD that include entries for 3D websites. The first entry listed there was for a series of sites designed by Vivatech, including Low Carbon Park: an online 3D environment that allows exploration of innovations in decarbonisation technology. I thought it would be great to build a similar environment, perhaps shaped like a home, that people could use to learn about appliance use and home improvements to reduce energy bills and aid decarbonisation.
At this stage, to establish the viability of building a 3D website before drafting designs, I decided to investigate the availability of JavaScript libraries for achieving this end. Two names came forward from some quick research: three.js and babylon.js. Both seemed very accessible, and I was confident that I could learn enough about them to complete a 3D project.
Fuel poverty was back in the island's news in August with government having announced a third round of financial support for parents and others receiving benefits.
For me, this further confirmed that the Manx Government seemed to be proactive when it came to supporting people in need on the island.
I began to construct a floormap for a 3D environment. This would allow me to test exportation of 3D models from Blender to three.js to ensure that building a 3D website would be feasible. I downloaded a number of prefabricated 3D models of kitchen untis and appliances from Adobe Stock and created Blender assets from them. I then arranged the models into a plan of a kitchen.
I experimented with an orthographic view at first. I liked the idea of peering into a room with an orthographic view as this can often have quite a clean, technical look. However, I ultimately decided to go with a perspective view since rendering in orthographic view removes any benefits of using 3D (i.e., since the camera doesn’t rotate in orthographic view, a 2D image of the same scene could be just as well placed on the screen with point and click areas, which would be less memory intensive).
I began sketching the way I envisaged some of the screens for a potential tool. This design is an educational tool aimed at adults. It teaches best energy practices and links users to services and procucts available locally.
The first set of sketches explored the idea of showing users a home that they could click around. There would be separate screens to show relevant decarbonisation technology the user could install in the virtual home, as well an option to fully customise a virtual home (e.g., to have the option to make it more like your own home). There would also be links to local services and products that could be of use to the user.
After drawing up the sketches, I re-asked myself “Who would (specifically) use this tool?” and “What would their motivation be?” To the former, I would expect homeowners between the ages of 21 and 60 to be the most likely users. As for the latter, the primary motivation would be a wish to save money by understanding where it’s lost.
The games I had research put some ideas in my mind of virtual homes that users could move around, turning appliances on and off, seeing directly how they save money, and giving them the option to install renewable sources of energy that would further reduce those costs (whilst acknowledging the real cost of installation).
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The games I’d found during my research were clearly aimed at young children. Conversely. I was aiming to talk to adults, that is, people who are earning money, paying bills, and dealing with the day-to-day issues the energy crisis has presented.
Although I was excited about the prospect of designing and building the game, I had to ask myself who specifically would use it?
I ran into a wall with this question: I could not clearly identify who the game should be for. My target audience was adults, but games of this nature are usually aimed at children.
Although these sorts of games are typically aimed at kids, there are circumstances under which adults do play games. For this reason, I felt it necessary to explore potential motivations for playing my game.
I wanted to talk to people who were struggling in order that I could help them, yet it seemed unlikely that those people would be willing – or even able - to take time out of their busy, high-pressure lives to play a game, especially if the same information was more readily available through a simple online or print publication. I found it tricky to pinpoint a motivation for the target audience to engage with the game.
My doubts were further compounded by realising (via further research) that smart meters were now readily available, offering people the potential to monitor energy use in real time and in their real homes. The virtual home might therefore be a hard sell, even if it was fun.
It was hard for me to accept because I’d become so excited about the idea of making a game, but the planned system overall lacked concrete direction, utility, and therefore, impact. I had to acknowledge that I had started to design something for my own enjoyment and that would likely not communicate with my intended audience. For this reason, I went back to the drawing board.
I wanted to stick with education but felt that I could perhaps forward my project with a slight shift in focus.
Figure 1: Trouble Maker. 2022. [video advert]. Available at: https://troublemaker.co.uk/ [accessed 1st August 2022].
Figure 2: Interactive installation at the Science Museum's Atmosphere exhbition [photograph by the author]
Figure 3: Interactive installation at the Science Museum's Engineer Your Future exhibition [photograph by the author]
Figure 4: Initial sketches for a virtual home design [sketches by the author]
Figure 5: Appliance cost functionality test in P5.js [screenshots by the author]
Figure 6: Rendered test screens for a 3D virtual kitchen [screenshots by the author]
Figure 7: Smart Meters. 2022. [advert]. Available at: https://www.smartenergygb.org/ [accessed 5th August 2022].
FIJNHEER, Jan Dirk, van OOSTENDORP, Herre, GIEZMAN, Geert-Jan, & VELTKAMP, Remco. 2021. Competition in a Household Energy Conservation Game. Sustainability, 13.