Insights from the Project Coordinator, Leon Nielsen, at CIRCE
CHRONICLE is a complex and highly integrated European project requiring close cooperation between partners. From a project management perspective, it was great to see the advancing work and the willingness of the partners to find compromises in order to make the required advances.
Seeing the social and affordable housing of O Cualann was an important motivational moment. Creating an automated framework for measuring building energy performance at a useful level of detail is a crucial step towards squeezing maximum efficiency from a building and suggesting quantitatively predictable building upgrades or building use changes. But there is a human element that must be considered not just for the success of our technical activities and the developments to follow, but for a just transition to a clean energy future.
Insights from the Communications Team
Margherita Fabbri at RINA:
At the General Assembly, we had the opportunity to have a Dissemination & Communication workshop focusing on three key issues:
- Social media: we considered the efficiency of the various platforms in use and the vision for how we use these platforms.
- Next Events: we identified some interesting upcoming events in which CHRONICLE could be presented.
- Sister projects: we also defined the strategy of cooperation in/with different cluster/sister projects in order to increase the visibility of CHRONICLE and expand the network.
Minna Kuivalainen at SIN:
The workshop on end-user engagement focused on brainstorming on engagement activities for residents in the pilot sites. Key questions included:
- What value does the CHRONICLE concept of digital tools for building performance assessment bring to the residents?
- How to talk about the project with the residents?
- What kind of activities could further motivate people to participate in the project?
Some of the main takeaways include:
- Understand people’s needs as well as those of buildings: how can we combine these two?
- Gamification and incentives/rewards are often an effective way to engage people.
- In regards to the language, how we speak is important. Keep it simple. It is okay to use some humour!
- Prioritise personal contact: meet people face-to-face, one-to-one if needed, to tackle specific issues or questions; be visible in the community, for example present at community events.
- Offer added value, such as additional services. For example, ’energy audits’ can bring value to residents. (An energy audit is a session to help people understand what kind of an energy contract is suitable for them, and what action they can take to save energy at home).
- Community building and engaging in joint action is usually effective. This needs to be properly planned and implemented by people with experience.
- Offer regular updates on the progress of the project but avoid information overload!
Engaging end-users and keeping them interested requires that we pay attention to their needs. There are many ways to go about it. Knowing the pilot site and being aware of people’s interests and motivating factors is important. We will continue the discussion in the coming sessions!
Insights from the Technical Partners
Angelina Katsifaraki at HYPERTECH:
Upon completing the first year of the project lifetime, the consortium has successfully set the foundations of the CHRONICLE system. During our GA workshop, the full list of the Business scenarios and corresponding use cases of the project was presented. We now have a clearer scope of the work to be done. Through our vivid discussions we answered many open questions and better understood the functionalities of all individual components. Soon, the collection of requirements and specifications will be completed based on the outcomes of our discussions but our work will not stop there! Our aim is to collaborate closely in the development tasks of the project and provide our support through the solid design of all the framework aspects.
A dedicated workshop was organized, focusing specifically on the powerful CHRONICLE Digital Twin Framework, the implementation of which has just started. The GA in Dublin was a great opportunity for us to sit together and openly discuss the technical implementation of the framework. As a first step, the data exchange between the two digital twins, the Data driven and the Physics-based, was discussed while the partners responsible for the development of all other components interacting with the digital twin framework consolidated its data model definition. We are looking forward to some first hands-on testing in the following months!
Prodromos Polychroniadis at Pragma:
The GA was a great opportunity to bring all the technical and pilot site partners together. What did we achieve in our workshop? We discussed and agreed on shared plans with regards to the equipment that is going to be installed at the recruited dwellings. The pilot partners informed us precisely about the steps they are going to follow, in order to facilitate the installation of that equipment after their tenants are recruited for CHRONICLE. The assisting technical partners described their processes in order to integrate their technical solutions upon those installations. All of the decisions taken during the workshop fully respect the timelines and requirements of the project and this was the most important outcome that we hoped to achieve.
