Innovation & Technology Product Design
Sophie-Anne Val
Nice to digitally meet you!
I’m Sophie-Anne, a Product-Service Designer with experience across four diverse countries.
Passionate about sustainable innovation, multilingual and specialised in leveraging emerging technologies to design products and services that make a positive impact on society and the environment.
Clean your Click
This project aims to develop an innovative ecology of practice around digital technologies. It explores the complex and plural relationship between humans and technology. It also examines the societal, technological, and ecological impact of human-machine interaction.
The core of this project lies in the analogy between digital pollution and Frankenstein to highlight the unseen impacts on digital ecosystems. Through the lens of Mary Shelley’s narrative, we are looking at digital pollution causing monstrous effects. Like Viktor Frankenstein’s creature, digital technology was born from human ambition and innovation, but it now moves in ways we struggle to understand or control. Its repercussions are environmental, psychological, and social.
This project integrates citizen awareness and engagement with machine intelligence to manifest ecological intelligence. It allows us to rethink our contemporary practices, cultivating awareness, responsibility, and a more measured, ethical, and regenerative relationship with digital environments.
This project doesn’t mean rejecting technology, it means reclaiming agency.
Unity Energy
Unity Energy is a smart meter that empowers individuals to make informed choices about their energy consumption while also enabling communities to collaborate on energy-saving initiatives.
By providing personalised energy profiles, Unity energy empowers citizens to understand their energy consumption patterns, leading to more informed decision-making and increased energy literacy. Individuals contribute to a collective data-base. This data, processed by HAECID, enables the cooperative to understand its member base, identify areas for improvement, and implement strategies to foster a more sustainable community.
Energy consumption varies significantly across user profiles, and understanding these patterns is essential for effective energy management. By analysing both individual and collective energy usage, local co-ops can get an overall ideas of the profiles within their coop and so enhance energy efficiency by identifying peak demand periods and plan policy and infrastructure development.
In partnership with Nesta
Creating Collaborative Futures
Creating Collaborative Futures: Collective Decision-making for the Energy Transition – was run in collaboration with the Collective Intelligence team at NESTA, the UK’s innovation agency, and focused on exploring the future of sustainable energy.
The brief invited the five Masters of European Design students to explore and envision how people and technology could collaborate to enable informed decision-making in energy systems that benefit communities and the environment over the next decade. To achieve this, the students employed one of NESTA’s tools, HACID.
HACID stands for Human and Artificial Collective Intelligence for Decision-Making and is a hybrid technology that aggregates artificial intelligence and crowd-sourced expert input. HACID supports decision-making for complex, open-ended problems like those in the energy sector. Its goal is to provide multiple suggestions and insights to help navigate these challenges.
Over the course of the intensive collaborative project, the students envisioned a 2035 future world vision and developed individual works that come together to form an interconnected system for communities to approach complex decision-making related to the energy transition.
