Engineering Comes Home: Co-designing nexus infrastructure from the bottom-up
Le résumé fourni par la source
The ‘nexus’ between water, food and energy systems is well established. It is conventionally analysed as \na supply-side problem of infrastructure interdependencies, overlooking demand-side interactions and \nopportunities. The home is one of the most significant sites of nexus interactions and opportunities for \nredesigning technologies and infrastructure. New developments in ‘smart city’ technologies have the \npotential to support a bottom-up approach to designing and managing nexus infrastructure. The \nEngineering Comes Home was a research project that turned infrastructure design on its head. The \nobjectives of the project were to: \n Demonstrate a new paradigm for engineering design starting from the viewpoint of the home, \nlooking out towards systems of provision to meet household demands. \n Integrate thinking about water, energy, food, waste and data at the domestic scale to support userled \ninnovation and co-design of technologies and infrastructure. \n Test new design methods that connect homes to communities, technologies and infrastructure, \nenhancing positive interactions between data, water, energy, food and waste systems. \n Develop a robust Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) Calculator tool to support environmental decisionmaking \nin co-design. \nWorking with residents of the Meakin Estate in South London, the project followed a co-design method \nto identify requirements, analyse options and develop and test a detailed design for a preferred option. \nThe outputs were: \n1) Ethnographic study of how residents use water, energy and food resources in their homes and key \nopportunities for engineering design to improve wellbeing and reduce resource consumption. \n2) Co-design of decentralised infrastructural systems in three workshops in 2016-2017. The first \nworkshop identified key priorities for development from the community using a novel token-based \nsystem design method, to enable participants to build up alternative designs for local provision of water, \nenergy, food and waste services. The second workshop provided participants with factsheets and \nphotographs of the candidate technologies, which were then analysed using a LCA Calculator tool. \n47 \nRainwater harvesting was selected as the technology for further co-design in the third workshop, which \nfocussed on scaling up a pilot installation. \n3) Pilot-scale smart rainwater system was installed in partnership with the Over The Air Analytics (OTA). \nOTA’s system enables remote control of the rainwater storage tanks to optimise their performance as \nstormwater attenuation as well as non-potable water supply. \n4) Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) Calculator to enable quick estimation of the impacts of new systems and \ntechnology to deliver water, energy and food, and manage waste at the household and neighbourhood \nscale. \n5) Stakeholders, including utilities, design consultancies and community based organisations, were \nengaged in three workshops to inform the wider relevance and development of the co-design methods \nand tools. \n6) Toolbox and method statements to standardise and disseminate the methods used in the project for \nwider application and development.
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