The Brief

Build a user friendly, interactive website and data visualisation tool that explores the diversity of ways citizens engage and can engage with energy and climate in the UK. The goal of this build is to showcase an open access database for users to explore diverse forms of public engagement with energy and climate change.

The Client

It’s an Outlandish preference to continue to collaborate and grow with people and projects, so when the UKERC Public Observatory team reached out we were really excited to find out more. We discovered that they wanted to publish their data around public engagement, and this immediately got our attention.

Our Solution

Having already designed and built UKERC’s main website, we repurposed the design and style for this new WordPress website. The new site is all about the work and research of the public observatory. Users can explore, contribute and visualise case study datasets here. 

We developed the visualise tool designing interactive bar charts to showcase the number of case studies using four categories:

  1. Form of Engagement
    E.g. community action or activism
  2. Public Participants
    The groups of people involved e.g. activists or consumers
  3. Topic
    What the case study was about e.g. fossil fuels or policy and planning
  4. Location
    Where the case study took place e.g. north west or scotland
A screenshot from the interactive mapping dataset and data visualisation

The Tech

This website was built in WordPress, using the Gutenberg editor with a handful of custom Gutenberg blocks. The main UKERC website was not built with Gutenberg in mind, so some modifications were needed to accommodate the additional flexibility that the new editor allows, while keeping the same layout. The basic case study data was initially imported from a csv, which was then fleshed out and expanded upon manually using the wordpress editor.

Impact

This website and data tool launched in early July 2022. We will keep a watchful eye on its growth and impact. The UKERC observatory team has ambitions to impact policy makers, academia, businesses, activists, community and the public alike. You can learn more about the UKERC observatory team here. You can also watch this webinar, an introduction to UKERC, their vision and how this tool is addressing a new direction for public engagement with energy and climate change.

Next Steps

Lots of people, organisations and governments are engaging with energy, climate change and net zero on an increased, ongoing basis. Use this website to find out what, where and how and it’s all been happening. Plus you too can contribute to this exploding body of knowledge. 

If you are developing a project that is making the world a better, fairer place, Outlandish would love to hear from you.

Visit ukerc-observatory.ac.uk