Building a design community for sustainable homes through configuration and open innovation

This paper presents a development project which aims to create a market place for sustainable homes – around a design community where the uses and producers collectively can develop new energy efficient solutions and thereby reduce the emmisson of CO2. The core functionality of the design community is a configurator where the users based on the produceres templates can design their own home at a selected address visualizing and estimating the energy consumption, total cost, CO2 emission etc. All the designs will be collected and rated in a design space creating transparency over the market and technologies. Furthermore will an idea space collect and rate ideas from the users. Through a combination of technical and user driven innovation the design community will act as a learning tool for the users and producers and thereby facilitate the development of a market for sustainable homes.