MASTERPIECE
A recommendation system to help people join energy communities.
- Services
- Design researchProduct and interaction design
- Sector
- Energy
- Touchpoint
- Digital platform
- Programme
- EU fundedBRIDGE initiative
- Client
- MASTERPIECE consortium
- Year
- 2025
Made with
Understanding what it takes to say yes to an energy community.
MASTERPIECE is a European project funded by the EU under the BRIDGE initiative. It develops a participatory digital platform to help people create and run renewable energy communities, with pilots in Italy, Turkey, France and Sweden.
Within the project, at Experientia, I designed Recomme: a recommendation system that helps work out whether a person might be interested in joining an energy community and, above all, which approach is most likely to convince them.
The pilot focused on the Çanakkale region, in Turkey.
The goal was not simply to collect information about people, but to turn it into concrete actions for bringing in new members and growing the community.
Process
A concrete opportunity that stays abstract for many people
Energy communities can be an important instrument against energy poverty, and to anyone who does not already know them they can look technical, complex and hard to understand.
The problem, then, was not only explaining what an energy community is. It was working out what could make that possibility relevant to different people.
On one side there were citizens and families, often with little digital experience, who had to understand whether an energy community could make sense for them.
On the other there were the community managers, who had to find new members, involve the ones already there, and work out how to grow the community.
To do that they needed to know the people better: what motivated them, what held them back, how involved they already were, and what kind of proposal might interest them.
Solutions
Start from the people, not from the questionnaire
An energy community involves many different actors: institutions, municipalities, utilities, aggregators, suppliers and funders. At the centre, though, are the people who keep it alive.
The first step was therefore to map that ecosystem and understand which roles, needs and relationships were shaping the decision to join.
Recomme was designed to focus on exactly that centre: the person, and their path towards joining.
Twelve profiles, to understand who is in front of you
Not everyone joins an energy community for the same reason.
The system identifies twelve profiles, among them households, commercial consumers, prosumers, passive users, operators of charging points for electric vehicles, community operators, and people already particularly active in saving energy.
These profiles help to understand who the person is, what interests them, and what role they could have in the community.
But the profile on its own is not enough. Someone can be interested in energy and not yet be ready to take part.
For this reason Recomme also considers the level of maturity.
Understanding not only who you are, but where you are
The second axis of the system describes the path towards taking part.
The model identifies several stages, from Awareness to Consideration, and on through Enrolment, Onboarding, Engagement, Consolidation, Proactivity and Mentoring.
The community manager uses the same logic to read the overall state of the community and see where its members are.
Crossing profile with maturity is what lets Recomme move from collecting data to recommending: not only “who is this person?”, but above all “what could make them take the next step?”
One question at a time, a recommendation at the end
To avoid the questionnaire effect, the assessment was turned into a guided conversation.
The person answers one question at a time, through scenarios written in the second person, images and concrete situations instead of fields and abstract questions.
Between one question and the next, the system also introduces information tied to the local context.
At the end it does not hand back a simple profile.
It hands back personalised recommendations: testimony from people in a similar position, examples of nearby communities, information about costs and benefits, and content that can make the proposal more concrete.
The idea is simple: the same energy community can be told in different ways to different people.
From the profile to the action
The community manager uses Recomme to read their own community and understand where to act.
The dashboard shows how many members are active, which goals they share, what stands in the way of taking part, and which stage of the path the community is in.
The system then hands back concrete actions:
- attract new members
- turn interest into participation
- organise meetings
- see which groups to involve
- identify what is missing to reach the next level
When the manager wants to involve one specific person, they do not have to fill in another questionnaire.
They can pick a photographic card that represents what that person is looking for, and Recomme suggests how to set up the conversation: acknowledge their experience, offer a concrete benefit, invite them to collaborate, or start from the subject of the bill.
Outcome
A system that turns profiling into recommendations
The result is a system that works on both sides of the community.
For the citizen, it turns a few questions about their circumstances and their relationship with energy into a personalised path towards taking part.
For the community manager, it turns the data collected into strategies for involving the right people in the right way.
The flows were designed for both users. A third, experimental flow was also built for the research itself, with a control condition, to measure whether and how much the recommendations really influenced the decision to join an energy community.
In this way the system does not simply assume that a recommendation works: it tries to measure its effect on the decision to take part.
