Citizen co-creation in water saving campaign using smart water solutions

The goals of the Fiware4Water project are geared around the uptake of smart water through the adoption of the FIWARE platform, enabling water companies and other stakeholders to share and process water-related datasets. Fiware4Water includes 4 demo cases in Greece, France, Netherlands and UK, covering the full water utility service lifecycle.

In the UK, South West Water has installed approximately 100 smart meters in Great Torrington in North Devon as a pilot site for moving towards customer-focused water consumption applications given that:

•  other utility providers already provide consumption applications and water companies can be seen by customers as being anachronistic in not providing similar technology,
•  the practical location of smart meters, typically in the street, makes it challenging for customers to monitor consumption frequently,
•  moving customers to a digital platform (mobile / webapp) gives water companies a communication channel that can be more frequent and less intrusive than traditional communication by letter, mailshot or phone,
•  smart metering data can be utilised effectively to reduce leakage.

Fiware4Water focuses on the integration of smart metering and citizen engagement to maximise the value of data in water management, which aligns nicely with the strategic goals of South West Water in reducing customer consumption through customer education, improving customer-side leak detection and moving towards smart water through smart metering and related activities.

During the project, a ‘Great Torrington Water Forum’ has been established to foster citizen engagement, raising public awareness in water consumption and leading to behaviour changes to achieve the shared goal in water saving. A series of activities are organised to facilitate the dialogues between the residents in Great Torrington, South West Water, University of Exeter, and EURECAT. These sessions enable the community of Great Torrington to share their local concerns of water and to identify ways that they can work together to reduce their water use. As part of this, the community are eager to support SWW to co-design the applications that utilise and make available the smart water meter data.By placing people at the centre of the design process it will have the potential for positive design outcomes given that: 1) applications are developed according to customers’ actual needs, rather than their needs as perceived by others, and 2) diversity in the co-creation group should naturally lead to the outputs that better meet broad demands of a range of consumers. However, the engagement is not a risk-free activity and facilitators must give consideration to 1) co-design may end up addressing only wants rather than needs, and 2) co-design can be a slow and, sometimes, confrontational approach to design and development.

The integration with smart meter data allows the community to better understand and observe the consequences of behaviour changes in order to co-evaluate the effectiveness of various actions. The co-creation process is realised as a set of agile development sprints rather than a traditional monolithic development activity in order to create many opportunities to review and assess the applications in development in order to best fit the needs of the customers.

Authors: South West Water, KWR and University of Exeter