Discover what people really value with bespoke research
Build appealing propositions with our experienced players
Discover how consumers use your product or service
Harness innovation to reduce vulnerability to fuel poverty and design smarter consumer protection
UX/UI excellence from a team of proven heavyweights
See beyond what people say to understand what they do in smart homes around the UK
Want to understand how different EV users charge their vehicles?
We have created five personas based on want consumers want from electric vehicle charging and demand-side response.
Kick-start innovation with design thinking. Map out how your customers experience your product or service. Then use simple exercises to structure your creativity.
We use 80% of our energy at home for heating and hot water. This produces 20% of our carbon emissions. We need to give people the heat they want without the carbon. So, back in 2013, we built a team of leading academics and consultants to understand how people use heat at home.
As renewable energy generation grows, matching available electricity supply to consumers’ demands gets harder.
We looked at how Electric vehicles could help to balance the grid by testing DSR with domestic EV users. Can this fit into people’s lives? Or will they reject it if it takes away their control?
We’ve done various studies to understand how life shapes energy use. We use sensors to see beyond what people say to what they do, and models to relate behaviour to energy use.
Millions of households live with illnesses made worse by the cold. What if you could prescribe a warm home to them? We thought we’d try this out by prototyping a smart energy service for households suffering from a cold-related chronic illness.
Soft launch your product or service to check it works before opening your gates to the public. Includes 100 highly instrumented homes and a suite of modelling tools.
Government is investing £100m in smart local energy system innovation projects from 2019-22. The aim is to create high value jobs providing cleaner, cheaper renewable energy.
When it comes to heating, people care more about their experience than how it’s delivered. They want to control how much they spend on their comfort, but don’t know how. If they could buy their Heating as a Service, then they choose how much to spend on their plan.
We gathered the best in the industry to run a 1-day bootcamp-style hackathon where this super-team developed a free open-source tool to score and publicly test solutions to UK fuel poverty.
Imagine people bought energy services, like a warm home, instead of units of fuel. Our consumer segmentation report is essential reading to developers of energy services.
There’s growing interest in the idea that businesses could sell energy as a service. Confident we could sell Heat as a Service, we wanted to explore how to add Hot Water. We used a Design Sprint to see how far we could get in three days.
How to articulate what the key value of your product and services? We ran a 1 day workshop to refine language around a groundbreaking new proposition
Make sure people can easily use your product or service before you launch it. Give designers the information they need to create delightful experiences.
Back when smart heating controls first came to market government wanted see how easy they were to use to inform their policies.
We succeed when you succeed: leverage our unique position
We are helping shape the policy landscape for the next 25 years
Matchmakers for government and entrepreneurs
Use Catapult modelling tools to validate propositions across the wider energy system
We collaborate with innovators to deliver projects that move towards decarbonisation goals
The Energy Systems Catapult is a not-for-profit set up by government to help the energy sector innovate. PeopleLab is home to our Consumer Insight team.
Find out more about the rest of the Catapult here then get us involved.
Invite us to your Hackathons and Design Sprints…
…it’s free!
Come and see us for a friendly
chat over a cuppa.
Cannon House, 18 The Priory Queensway
Birmingham B4 6BS8
We love small print. Said nobody, ever.