Renovating a home is not only a technical or financial decision. It is a process shaped by people’s priorities, knowledge, concerns, expectations and everyday lives. This is particularly important when decisions involve several households, as in multi-family buildings, where different perspectives and interests need to be brought together.
For RenoVisor, this means that participation is not something added at the end of the development process. It is part of how the tools are designed.
Why co-creation matters
RenoVisor aims to support citizens and other stakeholders in making informed decisions about building renovation and energy efficiency. To achieve this, the tools need to reflect not only what is technically possible, but also what people actually need when facing a renovation decision.
Co-creation allows us to bring together different types of knowledge: technical and scientific expertise, professional experience, local knowledge and the experiences and perspectives of potential users.
This helps us ask questions that cannot be answered through technical development alone:
- What information does people need to feel confident about a renovation decision?
- Which aspects of renovation matter most to different households?
- How can complex information be presented in a way that is understandable and useful?
- What barriers might prevent people from engaging with the tool?
- How can digital tools support discussion and decision-making in renovation processes?
By involving stakeholders throughout the process, we can identify these needs early and use them to shape the tools.
From ideas to prototypes: our co-creation approach
RenoVisor follows an iterative, multi-level co-creation process.
We first work within the consortium, bringing together expertise from different fields to identify key barriers, user needs, personas, use cases and potential functionalities. These discussions are then translated into workflows, screens and early prototypes.
But co-creation does not stop with the project team. External experts, stakeholders and potential users are invited to test and challenge what has been developed in co-creation workshops. Their feedback helps us identify what works, what is missing and what needs to be changed. It also provides us with contextual information, since the co-creation workshops are held in our 3 pilot territories: Basque Country, Netherlands and Ireland.
The process is therefore not linear. Ideas are developed, tested, questioned and refined through several iterations. Also, each one of the tools requires it’s own co-creation process.
From participation to better tools
A key principle of RenoVisor is that participation should have a real influence on the design. That is why the contributions of the participants are translated into design requirements and functionalities and subsequently tested with external stakeholders and potential users.
Co-creation does not mean that every suggestion can or should be implemented. Rather, it provides a structured way to understand users' needs, identify tensions and make better-informed design decisions.
Through this process, participation becomes a way of improving the relevance, usability and trustworthiness of RenoVisor tools while ensuring that the people who will ultimately use them are considered throughout their development.
For us, co-creation is not simply a method for designing a tool. It is a way of making renovation decision-making more people-centred.
