The project

The project involved the development of a national online service helping apartment owners and their managers make energy efficiency changes to the shared property of their buildings.

What the project does

The Smart Blocks service is designed to enable and equip apartment owners and their managers with the right tools and know-how to work together to get an energy efficiency project up and running in their building.

What its comprised of

The Smart Blocks website and online project management tool.
A robust community engagement strategy.
Measurement and evaluation mechanism.

Before Smart Blocks, little attention had been paid to the residential high-rise living sector due to the complexity of strata governance and nature of owners corporations. The barriers to making change for apartment owners included:

* Financial: In the sense that there was not much in the way of rebates and incentives as well as owners corporations not planning for energy efficient options when needing to upgrade or replace their assets;
* Old building stock making it difficult or expensive to retrofit;
* The complexity of the nature and governance of owners corporations and strata living; and
* A lack of knowledge about how to navigate around retrofits, financial planning, strata governance and simply, where to start.
These barriers culminated in apathy amongst apartment owners across Australia to implement resource efficient retrofits in their buildings. Our challenge was to create a meaningful service for this group to help them overcome these barriers and implement efficiency changes.

Rather than coercing people into changes in apartment living, we very intentionally took an empathic stance to the project. Our intention was to create a game-changing service that would not only help people overcome the barriers they face but would have them feel supported and inspired about what they could achieve in their buildings.

We wanted to create a movement amongst apartment owners and managers across Australia. Hearing successful stories and sharing tips and advice amongst owners was crucial to the success of the program. By showcasing successful projects and allowing community members to connect with ‘Smart Blocks’ champions would inspire them to act and initiate their own projects.

Sustainable Strata Steering Committee

City of Melbourne initiated this project via the establishment of the Sustainable Strata Steering Committee. The Steering Committee received funding under the Australian Federal Government’s Energy Efficiency Information Grant to deliver a national program to deliver independent and credible information to apartment owners and their managers. Based on previous projects, the Steering Committee identified three streams of work: the development an online toolkit, community engagement and measurement.

Consortium Partnership and Team Charter

The Smart Blocks steering committee commissioned three small businesses to work as a team to design and deliver the three streams of work that culminated in the Smart Blocks service (Huddle design, Digital Eskimo and Viridis).

To kickstart the project the three agencies co-designed a team charter articulating our strategic vision, purpose, design principles and ways of working.

This was a fundamental first step as it set the tone and expectations of how we would work together to achieve the best outcomes for our stakeholders and the community.

Design Research

We worked closely with owners and managers across Australia to co-design both the community engagement strategy and the Smart Blocks website and toolkit.

We ran a series of design research workshops to gain insight into the motivations, drivers and expectations of the different groups (owners, strata managers and facility managers). They helped us understand the current experience journey and to design the ideal experience of scoping and running a project.

Prototyping and iterative design

Based on this research we defined a set of design principles to be used by everyone in the consortium to prototype and test the various elements of the service. The first few prototypes included an end-to-end structure of the online project management tool and some of the elements of the community engagement approach (sketches and scripts for an animation and a collaborative board game).

We tested and iterated the prototypes in workshops around Australia before conducting further development and prototyping for the website interface and user experience design.

Design and Production

The design and production of the Smart Blocks brand, community engagement materials and website was an intensive process. Although each of the partners focused on designing and producing the deliverables relevant to their specific stream, this phase required high levels of collaboration to enable a seamless and consistent experience for the users.

It was important for Smart Blocks to be a trusted, independent and credible resource for this community. We worked very closely with energy efficiency and strata governance subject matter experts to make sure the content on the website was factual, informative and Australian state-specific.

Implementation and Delivery

Smart Blocks officially launched in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne in May and June 2013. The intention behind these events was not only about creating awareness about the service, but to celebrate all the effort and help we received with our users to develop this program.

The Smart Blocks team is still on the road delivering local workshops, presenting at conferences and running exhibition booths at industry events around Australia.

Smart Blocks enables people to enhance the resource efficiency of their buildings. The service provides educational information about the types of energy efficiency projects people can implement and the ways in which the strata governance structure works.

The online toolkit encourages collaboration amongst owners to work together and implement change. In doing so, Smart Blocks is supporting community building in apartment living.

Energy use in apartments accounts for 13% of the City of Melbourne’s Green House Gas emissions alone. People living in high rise residential apartments, can be using up to 25% more energy than someone living in a detached dwelling (Multi-unit Residential Buildings Energy & Peak Demand Study, Energy Australia, 2005). This is due to higher energy usage due to energy use in common property (lifts, car parks, pools etc). By enabling people to reduce energy use, we are helping people save energy and money, as well reduce their carbon emissions.

The Smart Blocks service is providing multiple societal benefits, including educational, economic, community, sustainability and environmental benefits.

Awareness: Users become aware of the Smart Blocks service, how it works and how they can use to implement the changes they are seeking to undertake.

Understanding: Users have a clear understanding about what Smart Blocks is and how it can support them. The focus of this step is about providing relevant information and demonstrating how the Smart Blocks service can help users with their projects.

Try: This stage is about users exploring the Smart Blocks website and project management tool. We provide users with the opportunity to try elements of the toolkit at events with the intention to motivate them to want to go online and sign up their building.

Use: Users have signed up to the Smart Blocks website, initiated a project and are making use of the information, templates and tools. Once they have implemented a project, they are able to track their energy savings on the Smart Blocks website and start another project.

Advocate/Follow: After implementing successful projects, Smart Blocks offers users the opportunity to share their stories as case studies for others interested in attempting the same projects. Smart Blocks events and panels also offer the opportunity for members of the community to find out more about the projects, network and exchange details.

Help: At various points in the user journey, Smart Blocks users require help and support. This is offered through the website and at local workshops, conferences and festivals.

We started by considering the leverage points within Sustainable Strata. When we first came together as a consortium of three agencies, each responsible for a separate stream, we spent time together to define our common purpose, vision for the project and ways of working. This was important in clarifying our shared intention and setting our direction for how would get there.

At this early stage we also considered the critical interactions between the different streams of work. Because we were each responsible for discreet, yet interdependent streams we needed to ensure we all understood the connections and dependencies between the streams. Output from one stream might be necessary for the design work of another stream (or vice versa) so we needed to understand when this was and how we would ensure the “hand-over” of critical insights.

We did this by mapping each of the streams and drawing out the connections and interdependencies together. We turned this into a large map, which we shared amongst the team. During the design research, prototyping and design phases we referred to this often, at times adding more detail or identifying critical gaps in the original brief, such as the lack of accountability for the development of a brand or a communication strategy. As a group we addressed these gaps.

Throughout the course of the project, we have been very mindful of the leverage point in the strata service system, particularly the stakeholders. There are several key stakeholder groups that provide information and support to apartment owners. Fundamental to Smart Blocks is our human centered approach in which we seek to gain insight into the motivations, drivers, interactions and expectations of the key stakeholders, including our target audience (apartment owners and their managers).

From our research we found that owners seek independent and credible information and they find case studies from other owners who have done similar projects the most compelling and trustworthy. This came out again and again, both in the design research and in the many events we have run and through conversations with owners. We are confident that this is one of the most important leverage points for people to adopt change and embrace Smart Blocks to help them do this. We have therefore sought to find people who have been successful in implementing energy efficiency projects who could act as champions and could present their stories (online, at events and in publications).

They are also more likely to trust information from local councils than information from strata managers and suppliers. What’s more, local councils had existing relationships with our user-base and were already seeking to help them with energy efficiency questions. We therefore worked with the councils to raise owners’ awareness of Smart Blocks and invited them to local launches and workshops where we delivered interactive workshops where people could interact and try the service.