Future Experiences - Renew your energy, resources, abilities together

Renew is an energy exchange service based within rural Africa in 2029. It is a tool for sharing resources and service in exchange for energy in order to give the community the power to create and manage their own equity circulating within their community. Whilst also promoting efficient use of your energy resources.

1 of 9

Renew's System Overview

Renew responds to the energy group’s future-based 2029 rural decentralised Malawian model village, TERRA. The TERRA community believes that energy should be freely accessible to all as it is fundamental for local productivity and progress. Here displays an overview of the renew system.

2 of 9

Expert Input

By working closely with experts within varied fields linked to sustainable development, my group and I examined the future possibilities for the use of energy: primarily within the global South. Renew acts upon our group’s vision for any new technologies to be introduced they must be integrating well within the community and promote a resourceful community philosophy to reduce waste.

3 of 9

Concept Development

I explored how Renew might be integrated into the community by generating possible community personas. Candis for example runs her own business at home and the amount of energy she needs fluctuates depending on how busy she gets. Grace however is retired and spends most of her time in the community garden. Here is an opportunity for an exchange that Renew will help you be made aware of. These paper prototypes were exploring how Renew might act as this visual queue through movement and form.

4 of 9

Community Impact

work : Renew helps you track and detect your excess home energy levels by visually indicating these to you and your neighbours, creating a new form of currency within the community and promoting self sustaining lifestyles.

5 of 9

Self Initiated - Scotland's Secondary School's Creative Future

This project proposal seeks to examine the integration of creativity within the future context of a Scottish Secondary education system. Creativity builds on skill sets like critical thinking, communication and collaboration. These are all required to thrive within within our ever changing job world, climate uncertainty and increasing cultural diversity to name a few. Creativity also encourages positive mental resilience towards overcoming challenges in the modern world. Future schools may place higher importance on the drivers displayed here to encourage such skills to develop.

6 of 9

Goals and Challenges

Responding to the pain points; exams restricting personal growth and interest in learning, root learning that can cause a ‘learn and let go’ behaviour and teaching to reach an exam all contribute to undermining the Scotland’s current Curriculum for Excellence objectives. These objectives were developed to anticipate some of the key attributes individuals should have in Scotland’s future context; for young people to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens. This posed me with the design challenge to think of new ways to reinvent how we might execute these goals in the future.

7 of 9

Value in Creativity

Creativity encourages anti-disciplinary thinking, problem solving and many other relevant skills a young person would benefit from in our ever changing world context. The traditional constructs of linearity, segregation and ‘teaching not guiding’ were key elements found that block the ability to think creatively and be creative. Therefore, not equipping young people to the best of its abilities with these vital skills to be set for life.

8 of 9

The project aims to outline the pre-sets of what the intended outcome sets out to achieve. I look forward to exploring this project further in the near future and hope that it has been an enjoyable preview for you. I believe that creative thinking/creativity has what it takes to broaden our minds about how we learn and the kind of people we become.

9 of 9

Hello! I’m Jennifer but most people call me Jen. I am passionate about doing things for the better, for people and communities alike. This can be seen throughout both of my final year projects and my time here at GSA.

Collaborating within a team is a vital element to my practice and I also see it as self nurturing in many ways, allowing me to express fresh ideas and approaches to help aid the design process. In my spare time, my curiosity for understanding people and their stories has led me down an extensive ancestry quest that has innately left me pretty mind blown at times. My dream project would be reimagining how design practices are taught and integrated into schools, but for now I’ll stick to encouraging creativity…one step at a time.