Amsterdam is rife with innovation within the energy sector. However, these innovators often work independently and remain invisible to others with similar ideas and goals. Our challenge was to design a platform in which findings, expertises and project outcomes could be could be shared between members. The Municipality could also contribute with resources such as office spaces and knowledge on fundings and needed permits.

After speaking to experts and potential users, we discovered that being part of a community and keeping in touch with people in the real world was an essential aspect of the platform. We also discovered that failure in finding relevant information easily and quickly caused huge frustration.

The first step was to work with the client in creating a framework that simplified the energy transition into categories and divide the massive amount of information that each project would contain. We were then able define each node of information and define tags and keywords which could be later searched based on this criteria. By further boiling the information down, we were able to create separate pages: User Feed, Meetups, Community and Library that were all linked together by the search feature.