Best in Category - Service Design 2014

Smart Blocks

Strata Community Australia / City of Melbourne / City of Sydney / Owners Corporation Network / Huddle design, Digital Eskimo, Vidiris, Sustainability at Work

Smart Blocks is a national online service helping apartment owners and their managers make energy efficiency changes to the shared property of their buildings.

Smart Blocks is a national online service helping apartment owners and their managers make energy efficiency changes to the shared property of their buildings.

Smart Blocks enables and equips apartment owners and their managers with the right tools and know-how to work together to get an energy efficiency project up and running in their building.

Smart Blocks was co-designed with owners and managers during the design research and prototyping stages. Our design-led approach helped us create solutions that best support and enable this community and environment.

Smart Blocks currently has 419 buildings registered and 214 projects started in the program.

Design Excellence

Smart Blocks is comprised of three streams:

The online toolkit encourages collaboration amongst owners to work together and implement change. In doing so, Smart Blocks is supporting community-building in apartment living.

The measurement and evaluation component of the toolkit measures the progress of the program as a whole and the energy reduction successes of individual buildings.

The toolkit is underpinned by a comprehensive community engagement strategy that connects owners and managers with tools, case studies and state-specific information.

These three streams allows the community to see what’s possible and know how to achieve energy efficiency changes in their own building.