digistainable NOW!

User-centered approaches for climate protection solutions in construction, industry, and transportation

The project offers an innovative, systematic, user-centered, and open-ended approach to rapidly developing digital climate protection solutions. Heterogeneous teams develop solutions with high CO2 savings potential in the building, industry, and transport sectors.

The three sectors of buildings, industry, and transport are jointly responsible for around two-thirds of total emissions in Germany (2019: buildings 122 million tons of CO2 equivalents, industry 188 million tons of CO2 equivalents, transport 163 million tons of CO2 equivalents). At the same time, the GreenTech Atlas of the Federal Ministry for the Environment predicts a potential saving of 200 million tons of CO2 by 2025 through digitalization (2016-2025).

The project was initiated to combine climate protection and digitalization consistently to increase the high CO2 savings potential. Digitalization is also a socially acceptable driver of opportunities for transforming climate protection in Germany, as digitization technologies enable new forms of economic activity and work suitable for the mass market.

The open-source solutions also motivate non-active economic actors to invest in more digital climate protection measures, positively address the goal of corporate climate neutrality, and thus drive cultural and market change. Specifically, at the end of the project, there should be three ideas for optimizing existing climate protection solutions and one radically new idea in the area of digital climate protection solutions.

All individual components of the project will be continuously bundled on the "digitalization and climate protection" platform and thus made freely accessible in the long term. To this end, an open-source innovation map, "digitalization and climate protection", will first be published through a systematic top-down identification of relevant fields of innovation in digital climate protection (milestone 1). Through the parallel development of a sustainable, active expert platform in which relevant experts network with heterogeneous teams, digital climate protection solutions will be (further) developed with the help of digital learning content. Agile working methods empower economic actors to take responsibility for their actions.

In the "climate action digital" cooperation workshop, existing climate action solutions will be optimized, and three specific ideas will be prototyped for optimization (milestone 2). New digital climate action solutions will be developed in the "digitalization and climate action" innovation lab. Thirty ideas will also be produced into three prototypes, with one idea ultimately being prepared for implementation (milestone 3).

The HPI School of Design Thinking is primarily responsible for the two project modules, "cooperation workshop" and "innovation lab". While the Cooperation Workshop focuses mainly on the further development and optimization of existing solutions, and the actors are empowered to do this through materials and teaching units in a primarily digital space, the innovation lab focuses on a more intensive and long-term innovation process intending to develop entirely new digital solutions for climate protection.

The innovation lab should also enable physical collaboration on-site and ensure more intensive support for the actors by trained coaches. For this purpose, the HPI School of Design Thinking is developing new curricula, methods, templates, and online content and conducting the associated workshops with experienced coaches.