Designing ampul: Exploring future prosumer interactions

Thanks to advances in technology a time has arrived where it is possible to generate energy by virtually everyone for a competitive price. To produce energy on a small scale, fossil fuels are unattractive because energy can be extracted from them more efficiently on a larger scale. For technologies such as solar photovoltaic panels, there is no scale limitation. For that reason alone, solar panels are an attractive means to generate energy for households. Nevertheless, experts or people with good background knowledge are needed to install and run such an energy production facility at home. So for laymen users without ‘special’ knowledge, the idea of personal energy production might not be very appealing. I believe that in order to establish a democracy in the energy market every user in the system should be able to become an active player and use technologies to generate energy. Is such a change in ‘users’ role’ easy to achieve? In the current energy market, ‘not’! Energy as medium is very abstract and does not carry any tangible form and is therefore very hard to relate to a tangible action. In order to motivate people to take an active role in producing and using it, I think the way and the form we use it, should have more relation with human nature. In order to do that, first the current understanding regarding ‘energy production and consumption’ of users should be explored.The so called ‘prosumer’ is introduced, which combines producer and consumer in one user. In this project, after a thorough exploration of the current place of the user in the energy market, I create a concept- which I name Ampul- that aims to connect personal or small-scale energy production with people’s domestic environment in a meaningful and natural manner. The Concept House1, which was built in Heijplaat, Rotterdam under a European founded project to explore the user perception, involvement, understanding and acceptance of newly introduced sustainable technologies, is used as a context to test the created concept with actual users.