Zero carbon housing online tool

The CSIRO tool allows ‘citizen scientists’ to share their own house/building data, which helps educate Australians on how to build sustainable homes.

What we did:

Design brief

CSIRO, along with Renew and ClimateWorks, collaborated with Digital Garden to discover, design and develop a proof of concept zero carbon housing website that could showcase homes around Australia that have achieved net zero carbon status.

The purpose of the website is not only to demonstrate the various pathways to zero carbon housing, but most importantly, provide the evidence that it has been achieved.

The aim is to chart the use of sustainable materials and practices in the construction of homes across Australia, building a database by which other citizen scientists can chart through data visualisation how their sustainable homes compare against others in their state and across the country.

Digital Garden ran a series of focus groups, workshops and user interviews in a discovery phase with citizen scientists and partner agencies of the CSIRO. From there, we created a set of user requirements that served as the foundation for wireframes, UI design, data visualisation and the development of the new portal.

Complete data control

Citizen scientists are able to provide only the data they want to through a flexible privacy tier system. The system has also been designed to remind users when new data types are available for entry or when data might need updating to stay relevant.

Presenting savings

Users are able to see the benefits of their sustainable choices in the form of cost savings against the average. These savings are displayed alongside the charts and will dynamically update depending on what data has been entered.

User generated case studies

Users can create their own house case studies by inputting data, details and photos. Each user’s input data automatically charts to existing user data - continually enriching the datasets displayed to the public.

Results

We wanted to drop you a line to say thanks. It was great to work with Digital Garden and we’re very happy with the result.

The CSIRO Team

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