Designing with empathy
Empathy-led design can encourage people to retrofit their homes in a way that current measures are failing to achieve, Steve Hall, political economist of energy futures at the University of York, tells eolas Magazine.
“People will make big decisions on their home when it satisfies emotional needs, not just financial payback criteria,” says Hall.
“The messaging seeking to incentivise retrofitting that is rooted in cost and carbon savings does not hit home. Incentives are not triggering change. Between 60 and 80 per cent of households who received subsidies for retrofitting would have done it anyway.”
He indicates that people may not always understand their options regarding retrofitting, are not necessarily equipped to maximise utility, and can be inconsistent in their choices.
Hall says a person’s perspective on their home corresponds with how many improvement measures they decide to make. This perspective is influenced by their stage in life, and whether they view their home as starter, fixer-upper, or forever home. Understanding this perspective enables market segmentation.
“If we want to understand people’s stories, we need to start with empathy in the types of policy that we design,” says Hall.
A partnership between the University of York and various combined authorities (city region level local governments), along with the UK Energy Research Centre, found that a more relational and human-centred approach to people’s decision-making would be more effective in achieving retrofit uptake.
Hall demonstrates the value of human-centred design by recounting a use case from the book Creative Confidence by co-founders of design practice IDEO. This case shows how design thinking was applied to MRI scans of children. “When small children come for an MRI scan, they often need sedating because it is scary,” explains Hall.
Redesigning the MRI machine was not possible, but altering the experience of an MRI scan was. Providers turned the experience into a story for children, such as pretending they were going on adventure. This led to an 80 per cent reduction in sedations. “A huge difference just by taking a different perspective,” says Hall.
Retrofit Policy Lab
The university’s work on this empathy-based approach was synthesised into the Retrofit Policy Lab website. It features a persona box comprising multiple chatbots representing stakeholders in the rental market with varying positions on energy, climate, and retrofit. The site aims to provide an understanding of these stakeholders on a one-to-one basis.
Wendy, one of the chatbots, is a 42-year-old self-employed mother living in a heritage semi-detached in Whitby, north Yorkshire. Hall states that “the idea that she is going to take on a deep fabric first retrofit is bananas”.
“Wendy is not disengaged, she is knackered,” explains Hall, adding: “But there is a way you can bring Wendy along with you.”
For people like Wendy, Hall asserts that you must reduce the expectations of what she can accomplish in her home regarding retrofitting. Therefore, it is important to focus on delivering adjustments with a positive impact which can be felt quickly.
Hall discusses a study conducted in the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority. It explored different relationships in the rental market and how it relates to the energy performance of the property. “Low- to mid-income, early career young people need different stuff than hard-pressed tenants in the lowest income group,” explains Hall.
This does not mean that a separate policy has to be designed for each group, Hall says, adding: “One size does not fit all but we think about five sizes fit most. It is about designing that journey in a different way.”
Different narratives on retrofitting will work for different stakeholders. “We must design differently because you do get to a point where people are just not interested in grants,” says Hall.
“We must design differently because you do get to a point where people are just not interested in grants.”
“This is not because it is not attractive for them but because it is not landing in their world. When you achieve that, it enables you to build that bridge between what you want them to do and what they are likely to take up.”
This requires “empathy mapping”, where a profile is built on landlords which considers their retrofitting efforts, smart metre data, and their buildings’ energy performance certificate (EPC), the UK’s equivalent of the BER. Hall says it is also valuable to speak to landlords to gain an understanding of their perspectives on retrofitting. He adds that it is important to reflect landlords’ concerns in policy.
The University of York synthesised landlords’ perception of their treatment of tenants and their emotions and created a tool called ‘Pragmatic Paul’. “All of my economic thinking comes from the understanding that people make emotional decisions, not rational decisions,” says Hall.
“Our job with ‘Pragmatic Paul’ is to find policy that flips those emotions. Instead of worried, they need to feel confident. Instead of confused, they need to feel informed.
“We need a prototype solution that is going to land in their relational and emotional world in that way and then we design something form there.”
The solution they created was the LetZero project. It is a three stage journey aimed at delivering fabric improvements for landlords. Stage one includes an initial review to see how challenging it would be to improve a landlord’s property portfolio to EPC C.
In stage two, landlords are provided with a retrofit scenarios report that compares renovation pathways to EPC C. Stage three involves the renovation process which Retrofit Policy Lab assists landlords in navigating.
Concluding, Hall says: “That is where empathy-led design gets you. It offers a different perspective on a problem we often think is too big and scary to do anything but throw a lot of capital at.”
