The project was undertaken as a group with Elizabeth Akins, Elisa Dametto, and Jane Lehtinen as part of the Designing for Government course at Aalto University. The client was the Finnish Ministry of the Environment.

<aside> 📅 - 2020

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<aside> ⌛ - 4 months

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<aside> 🔖 - **Design Research

• Service Design**

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<aside> 📍 The project entailed research, and co-creation to define the main pain points that prevented citizens from transitioning away from oil heating. An equitable solution that leverages community participation was designed that aimed to provide support throughout the entire transition.

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Background: Oil Heating in Finland

The brief for the course, "Just transitions to post-oil heating in homes," was commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of the Environment in collaboration with the research group Towards Eco-Welfare State: Orchestrating for Systemic Impact (ORSI). Over the course of four months, our team worked to provide a proposal that supported the Ministry's goal of supporting citizens in transitioning away from oil-heating.

Research: Mapping out the System

We began our research with a participatory workshop with representatives from the Ministry of the Environment and ORSI to dive deeper into the brief and concisely define the goals of the project. The workshop was composed of a warm-up exercise, followed by an activity for visioning and defining expectations about the project into groups of wishes on the topic of energy, challenges to renewable energy and perceptions about transitions.

To bring a systems perspective to our work, we also interviewed researchers, public sector professionals, individuals, and non-profit organization representatives to map relevant players and networks which support transitions away from oil-heating to renewable energy options. Additionally, we conducted video, call, and email interviews with homeowners who currently use oil heating systems. Further desktop research into government policy and academic articles further informed our analysis.

Using the CATWOE tool (Customers, Actors, Transformation, World view, Owner, Environmental constraints) to map out the oil heating system and potential intervention areas.

The key insights formulated from our research were based on Susan Michie et al.’s Behaviour Change framework (Michie et al., 2020):

1. Capability of homeowners to transition vastly varied, and it was important to address them all.
2. Opportunity to transition was defined by the not only the homeowners financial capability, but also social barriers, timing, and the availability of local solutions
3. Motivation to transition was limited, as top-down coercive solutions caused distrust in the government.

This led to our main design challenge:

How might homeowners in smaller communities be supported in resilience and independence for easing the transitions?