Design thinking methodology application to develop social acceptance questionnaire for renewable technologies

Abstract

Energy ventures will continue to grow, as will their impact on the daily lives of societies. In this context, the study of the social acceptance of renewable energy generation technologies and their projects becomes relevant. Different authors have been studying the social acceptance of these technologies around the world using traditional methods for applying research questionnaires. A process that can frequently result in surveys that do not adequately address the issue, are challenging to use, are not effectively understood, do not fully respond to the problem, or even make data analysis difficult. The main contribution of this article is to present to the scientific community how using design thinking to create surveys can provide clearer, more direct, assertive, and empathetic questionnaires. In this way, the goal of this work was to use design thinking's human-centered design methodology to develop questionnaires for social acceptance research. Two case studies were conducted using this methodology, one to investigate the acceptance of onshore and offshore wind energy in southern Brazil. And the second is to investigate the social acceptance of photovoltaic distributed generation in a small city. The application of the human centered design method has not yet been used to formulate questionnaires for acceptance of renewable energy technologies (RET) studies and represents a cutting-edge approach that can be implemented quickly. Three main points stand out: easy adjustments of spelling errors and coherence, construction of a questionnaire with less invasive questions, generating greater comfort at the time of the interview, in addition to better logical and sequential development of the questions.

Keywords

• Human centered design
• Wind power
• Photovoltaic distributed generation