About the project

This website is part of RED - Future Currents, a project run by the RED Unit at the Design Council to investigate domestic energy use and production. The ten week project has developed concepts for ways to help owner occupiers reduce their domestic energy consumption and C02 emissions.

To look at energy saving from a homeowner’s point of view. Our team of designers and policy makers lived in a draughty Victorian terrace in Lewisham. We worked with 12 householders across London to get insight and generate ideas, backed up with input from leading energy experts.

The proposals and policy recommendations are work in progress. We want them to provoke thought and open up discussion on the role a design-led approach could play in making energy saving desirable and user-friendly.

Acknowledgements

The RED team for this project was:

Robin Murray, Colin Burns, Jennie Winhall, Chris Vanstone, Nick Morton, Kirstie Edmunds, Jude Codner and Chloe Myers.

Advising us on the project, and jointly writing the policy paper was Matthew Lockwood, and we were joined on this project by Haiyan Zhang and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Interaction Design Insitute Ivrea who participated as part of their Masters Programme in Interaction Design.

The team was assisted by the following organisations: Arup Engineering, Live|work, Matt&George, More associates; National Energy Services & Stroma Technology.

Many thanks to:

Brenda Boardman, Creative Environmental Networks (CEN), Energy Savings Trust, David Hirst, Richard Hurford, Phil Jessup, Philip Kear, GLA, Robin Stott, Sustainable Energy Action (SEA), and all the people who attended the Domestic Energy Efficiency Charette.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Licence. The Design Council must be credited as authors. Work is only altered with our permission. Work is not resold.

Desktop Windmill Application

The Design Council and Matt&George make no warranty that the Materials are free of infection by computer viruses or other contamination. The downloading of any of the Materials is at the individual user's own risk and the user will be solely responsible for any damage or loss. For further information on our conditions of use, please visit Conditions of Use and Privacy Policy on our main website.

To install the application click on one of the links in the download section for either a Windows or Mac version. To uninstall from Windows simply delete the Windmill.exe file from whichever directory you installed it on, commonly on the desktop. To uninstall the Mac version just drag it into the trash.

The data for the Desktop Windmill is supplied by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce.

	What next? Check out our ideas, tell us which you like best and give some of your own while you’re at it by visiting the home page.   How to find out more Find out more about the Design Council and its work or keep up to date with what the RED team's thinking and doing on our weblog.