08 / DESIGN FUTURES RESEARCH
High Efficiency Heat Pumps
2025Home ↔ TransitionFour-person team
High Efficiency
Heat Pumps
How can London’s heat-pump transition adapt to different homes, policies and lived realities instead of relying on one technical solution?
Adaptive Low Carbon Heating in London studies why a proven low-carbon technology remains difficult to adopt across existing housing. The project treats efficiency as a relationship between buildings, infrastructure, policy, cost, trust and household behaviour, then uses futures methods and participatory research to identify adaptive transition pathways.
The transition is shaped by policy, infrastructure, housing and behaviour—not efficiency alone.
PESTEL research and signals from 2021–2025 revealed a fast-moving field: electrification targets and grants sit beside grid constraints, installer shortages, retrofit cost, uneven housing stock and low consumer confidence.
Adaptability became the key design principle: the system must respond to different homes, users, policies and rates of change.
Stakeholders and residents made the abstract barriers playable.
Homeowners at the Heart of Change
A Snakes and Ladders workshop translated finance, trust, installation, housing constraints and policy support into a shared research tool. Gameplay surfaced lived barriers and opportunities that conventional questionnaires often miss.
From contextual states to multiple pathways and a 2025–2050 roadmap.
Bridging technology, design and society.
The project delivers an adaptive methodology, strategic roadmap and participatory research game for exploring London’s domestic heating transition.
A low-carbon transition becomes durable when technology can adapt to social context—and when residents can influence how the transition is implemented.↗View the complete 56-page project PDFAll research sprints, charts, workshops, literature review and individual contribution
FormatFour-person Design Futures project · 2025
ContributionFour-person collaboration. I led data and theoretical research and contributed the project’s visual communication and participatory prototype.
MethodsDesk research · Data analysis · Stakeholder mapping · Strategic foresight · Participatory game · Roadmapping
FULL PROJECT ARCHIVESee the complete project,
PDFOpen complete project ↗See the complete project,
in its original sequence.
The webpage foregrounds the project’s argument. The PDF preserves the full research, visual development and documentation.