The project developed tools for understanding the energy in our material world, from cataloguing and calculating the embodied energy for everything the designer owns to creating ways of visualising the energy shadows of our goods. The outputs from the project, The Megajoule Challenge and Energy Trumps, are a set of ways to think about energy at the earliest point in the design process, where it can have the most significant impact.
In order to reach the UK’s target of an 80% CO2 reduction by 2050 we need a major re-think of our energy use down to every last material object. The Megajoule Challenge rearranges the design process to place decisions about embodied energy first, by defining a set of energy quotas for the design process. The challenge tackles a classic, the Anglepoise lamp. While the Anglepoise’s ingenious mechanism allows adjustable light at any position, this functionality comes at a cost of approximately 142 megajoules. As we reconsider every object from an energy perspective, as much of this functionality as possible has to be delivered for far less energy. Quotas of 1, 10 and 20 megajoules were set to see what output would be possible at a fraction of the energy and how we get the most functionality out of every joule of material.
The Energy Trumps are a creative tool to think about energy at the start of the design process. They provide a fast visual reference for embodied energy to facilitate easy comparison of materials.
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