Engaging households in sustainable renovation: Exploration of a complementary approach

One of the major challenges for sustainable resource use lies in the renovation of the existing building stock. Less than 1% of the total building stock in North-West Europe is renewed each year, which means that most gain has to be achieved by renovation of the existing building stock in combination with changes in behaviour by residents, the end-users of the buildings. Commonly used methods to stimulate and support residents in making adjustments to their homes, are mostly monodirectional. Residents then are passive receivers of information and advice. Previous research shows that active involvement and multidirectional exchange leads to better results. In line with these findings, the study presented in this paper takes approaches that are used in the field of product development for and with end-users as a starting point. These approaches, such as co-design processes, creativity techniques and vision development to come to novel ideas, appear to have characteristics that are conducive to stimulate people to make changes towards sustainable renovation. The study explored if and in what way these approaches can complement the commonly applied methods. For this purpose, a number of sessions, called 'Livinggreen Labs', were organised. In the sessions several techniques were applied for a number of themes and with varying types of participants. The sessions were evaluated by the participants, as well as by the organisers. The findings suggest that the approach tested in this study can provide an attractive complementary way to sensitise people to the possibilities of sustainable renovation and sustainable lifestyles. The sessions showed high involvement of the participants. Peerlearning and exchanging perspectives between people with different backgrounds were highly appreciated. The approach seemed to be most useful for vision forming and participatory processes in local urban development programs as opposed to best practice knowledge transfer. In order to more purposefully compare these different methods in the future, the former might be called “emerging knowledge transfer”. Because of the specific context of the project in which the study is executed, further investigation is required to assess whether and how the results apply in different contexts. Furthermore, detailed insight is to be developed in what ways the use of techniques from the design field, together with existing methods, yield the best longterm effects on sustainable renovation activities by residents, i.e., achieve real impact