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Rebecca FordHi all.
Vicki – I think this is a great idea, as both practitioners and people trying to make changes have a whole set of criteria they have to assess new products against. We have been looking at developing a decision making tool as part of the Energy Cultures project program, but initially we were thinking of these being at the level of one type of product vs another type (i.e. insulation vs. installing heat pump vs. installing thick drapes etc etc.). What we have come to realise through the research to date is that these different product types differ in a numer of characteristics (e.g. upfront cost, skill level needed to install, etc. etc.), and that different people care about different characteristics more or less. So one of our current projects is to develop decision making support for people through evaluating the characteristics that are important to them, and then highlighting the particular upgrades that would be best suited to the particular preferences of a particular person.
However, I can easily see the same sort of decision making tool being used by practitioners but instead of looking at the level of heat pump vs. thick drapes (product type 1 vs. product type 2), we think about heat pump 1 vs. heat pump 2 (product 1 vs. product 2 of the same type). This would help practitioners to rate these products according to the particular characteristics they were interested in, and this would help provide a level of independence and rigour to the recommendation, provided the data input to the tool was carefully done.
I’d be really keen to talk more about this and see if we can integrate the research with the great knowledge base of people actually doing things, for both of the tools! Perhaps we can set up a Skype call with anyone on here who is interested to explore this further….
