UT 330 - FALL 2025
STUDENTS
Jack Bernard, Pranav Boopalam, Elijah Stowell
PROFESSORS
Matthew Wizinsky
Based on Ann Arbor’s proposed Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU), our project uses interaction design as a research tool to imagine how excess household energy could be shared among neighbors in a microgrid. How will neighbors and local businesses collaborate to form new coalitions for energy production/sharing? During outages, how will participants choose whether to sell, share, or trade energy? Through our prototypes, we observe how different affordances affect social outcomes and individual choices. We document how the disclosure and portrayal of certain information can dictate which households stay powered through an outage, and which do not.