Nesta’s clean heat neighbourhood work is exploring how households engage with and respond to the idea of a coordinated clean heat transition within their local area. The project aims to understand how people react to their area being set in a clear direction for clean heat. One of the key questions this project seeks to address is:

“If we communicate future home heating options to residents, how will they respond?”

In this phase of our work, we’re testing how to present clean heat zoning information, test household willingness to engage, and identify the appropriate level of detail that facilitates their decision-making.

We took a design-led, iterative approach: prototyping, testing and refining what clean heat neighbourhoods could look and feel like from a household’s point of view. Our goal is to uncover what works for households and to refine how clean heat neighbourhoods, or other area-based low-carbon heat schemes, are communicated. Improving clarity, confidence and action around heating choices.  

One of the primary assumptions driving this work is that clear direction and understanding of the low-carbon transition can help households make more informed decisions about their heating options and ease the process of adopting low-carbon technologies in their homes. To test our core assumptions, we focused on three key questions:

• How do people react to being told they’re in a ‘clean heat neighbourhood’ and what questions does this raise?
• How do people react to viewing an area clean heat neighbourhood plan? Does it make them more confident in future decisions?
• How do people react to being presented with technology for their home?

We prototyped a touchpoint for each of our three key questions and tested them with our internal team at Nesta.

Prototyping allows us to bring our ideas in contact with reality. Through rapid prototyping, we can quickly test recommendations with end users, generate insights and iterate our interventions.

It’s important to note that the prototypes we developed are not intended to be the final solutions or tools to be rolled out later on. Instead, we view them as provocations – experimental touchpoints designed to spark thought, encourage feedback and test our core assumptions about how households might engage with a coordinated transition to low-carbon heating.

Through our qualitative research, we heard a strong need for wider direction-setting: people were unsure why they’d been contacted or how this related to a broader plan. We also heard that even though social reinforcement may build confidence in the scheme, individual agency must be stressed – people expressed the need for a balance of convenience in coordination, while still maintaining the ability to have their own say. Lastly, we saw the importance of building trust in the technology itself – people want to understand what it is and how it works. There is a need for the proposed technologies to feel more familiar, especially compared to more traditional heating systems, such as boilers.

From this early work and based on what we’ve heard, we are now focusing our second phase of testing around three refined questions:

• How do we build confidence in clean heat neighbourhoods and that an area-based transition is going to happen?
• How can we communicate what is collective and what is individual in a clean heat neighbourhood process?
• How do we communicate information about the technology proposed for each home in a way that builds confidence?

We're currently recruiting participants for another round of prototyping and testing. In this coming phase, we will conduct in-depth interviews using new prototypes based on our new main questions. This includes interactive materials like journey mapping and communication touchpoints that simulate a clean heat neighbourhood rollout. Our goal is to further grow our understanding of what interventions can make low-carbon heating more accessible, understandable, and appealing to households. 

We will share our learnings in May.