January 30, 2020
InterConnect “Empathizing with Design Thinking” Workshop
On the 20th and 21st of January POLIMI hosted in Milan the workshop “Empathizing with Design Thinking”. The workshop has been organised by POLIMI and Yncréa under the scope of task 1.1. “Human-centric services and business models definition” of work package 1 “Use Cases, Business Models and Services” of the InterConnect project.
The main goal of this WP (lead by EEBUS) is to identify the energy and non-energy services of the project and set the corresponding use-cases considering the requirements for interoperable, modular and decentralized architectures.
All these features will consider the stakeholders involved and their roles to establish interactions and rules of engagement. Specially, task 1.1. (lead by Yncréa) will use a Design Thinking approach to derive a set of existing and innovative potential services and business models with an interactive approach that will be tested in the pilots.
The agenda
In the first day of the workshop, the team from Politecnico di Milano introduced to the participants the Design Thinking approach. After the main highlights about the methodology have been presented, the participants have been divided in four different groups to work on user experiences that will be developed in the project.
In the second day of the workshop, the team from Yncréa moved from individual users to a collective action perspective, starting to introduce the work that will be done to build the pilot’s ecosystems. Again, partners have been divided in four groups and each group worked on a different ecosystem: 1) renewable energy community (residential houses) and electrical vehicle; 2) renewable energy community (residential); 3) social housing condominiums; 4) student residence public buildings.
The work developed by each group was presented and discussed during the two days and will now pave the way to the work that each pilot will start to develop.
The following partners have participated in the workshop: EEBUS, ENEDIS, Engie, Gridnet, INESC TEC, KEO, Planet Idea, POLIMI, RSE, TH!nk-e, VITO, VizLore, VUB, Whirlpool and Yncréa.
Upcoming workshops
Three more workshops are schedules to define the:
- A one-day workshop in March, in Brussels (Belgium);
- A three-day workshop in April, in Porto (Portugal);
- A three-day workshop in May, in Toulon (France).