Regen energy experts are collaborating with artist Karenza Sparks through the Regen Art Lab residency programme to explore the challenges and opportunities in decarbonising the UK's heat.
Regen energy experts are collaborating with artist Karenza Sparks through the Regen Art Lab residency programme to explore the challenges and opportunities in decarbonising the UK's heat.
The Heat Creatures are an arts project which teach us about the world of home heating and how it impacts the climate emergency – each Heat Creature is a personification of a heating technology from the green, the not so green and the big polluters. The Heat Creatures were designed and made by Karenza Sparks, during her Regen Art Lab residency in 2021/2022.
You can make your own Heat Creatures playing card deck by printing them at home. Download and print the cards above, then simply fold each page in half and stick together to make a double sided card. Finish off by trimming the edges.
We would love to hear any feedback about how the Heat Creatures are being used to start conversations about home heating and the climate emergency. Please get in touch with any thoughts.
Karenza Sparks is a multidisciplinary designer, maker and animator from Cornwall. She has a particular interest in gamification, story telling, interactive experiences and participatory artworks. Sparks graduated from Kingston school in 2020 and much of her work has been highly collaborative.
The Regen Art Lab is a new artist residency programme bridging the gap between experts and artists, to delve more deeply into energy transition issues. Through collaboration, the residency aims to showcase the pivotal stories needed to realise the transition, which are well informed, relevant and meaningful.
The theme for this residency was decarbonising heat. Decarbonising home heating is shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges of the climate emergency in the UK, because of lack of public awareness and political will power. You can read more about the challenge of decarbonising the UK’s heat in our ‘decarbonising of heat’ paper, and through the resources that Karenza compiled during her residency.
This week, the government released its much-anticipated heat and buildings strategy; a necessary first step in the strong leadership required to overcome the challenge. For much of the public however, the corresponding news coverage will have been their first exposure to the coming changes. As Karenza discusses in this blog, decarbonising heat is not just about climate change, but is an intrinsically personal topic, and so, lack of public awareness is a serious threat to its success.
I am very excited to be Regen Art Labs’ first artist in residence – it is such a unique opportunity to be able to collaborate with Regen’s energy experts in this way. I am also eager to be working on such an incredibly relevant and pressing issue: how we are going to meet the challenge to decarbonise the UK’s heat. Through this collaboration I have the opportunity to create socially meaningful work, and with Regens resources I look forward to being quite ambitious in my approach.
My background is in illustration and animation, so I am new to the intricacies of this highly technical field. I hope the fresh perspective I bring will shine a light on new ways of thinking and innovative approaches to the subject for the Regen team and wider energy stakeholders, and that my learning journey and creative skills can help connect those outside of the energy industry with the ways in which decarbonising heat affects their lives. I am particularly interested in the amalgamation of art and science, and its ability to ‘re-humanise knowledge’ and to encompass the human experience of the world more fully as something both logical and emotional.
In my first week of research and exploration I have already learnt so much that has surprised me about the social and environmental impacts of heating. For example, the realities that 37% of the UK’s carbon emissions arise from demand for heat, and that between 10% and 13% of UK households are considered to be living in fuel poverty. These are the sorts of facts that I’m looking to bring attention to as I believe they remain largely unrecognised by the public, yet are critical for us all to consider when determining how we will choose to heat our homes.
My understanding is that, unlike the switch to green electricity sources (which has largely occurred at grid level), the change to decarbonised heating methods will be more personally involved and can require disruptive change in the home. This asks for a general acceptance of the methods and technologies associated with low carbon heating. The emissions associated with heating are a global environmental concern, but at a more basic level, heat is a human necessity, and there are wide reaching social impacts that come with its costs and availability. Through the ArtScience approach, I want to bridge the gap between the personal and technical issues that decarbonising our heat raises.
I often work with interaction design in my practice, through community projects, narrative, and play. I believe interaction is key when engaging people with a subject, and the decarbonisation of heat is an issue where public engagement is especially important. Earlier this year, I co-ran a community design workshop resulting in a series of ‘Flags of Humanity’ which shared different perspectives of humanity and imagine a united and borderless human future.Through this project I was able to create a platform for ideas and discussion, and by collaborating with the community we produced something beyond the scope of what I had to say as an individual. I will use this experience to feed my approach: involving the audience to fully explore what is both a complex and personal topic.
Through the process of collaboration and interaction, I intend to provoke new thought, conversation, and understanding around decarbonising heat. You can follow my journey through the live mind map here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lpvWsO0=/ .
Mark Howard (project manager, Regen): Changing the way we heat our buildings, though technically achievable, is without doubt a tremendous challenge. Yet a possibly bigger challenge is getting landlords, tenants, and homeowners to support this change. Whilst it feels to me like public awareness of the issue is at a decade long high, it is hard for most people to really engage with what this might concretely mean for how they heat their home – a great communication challenge lies ahead.
Working with Karenza, an artist who came to this with no pre-conceived ideas about heat, has been refreshing and rewarding. I have enjoyed sharing my knowledge of the sector, challenging myself not to pass on too many of my own conclusions about what might be ‘best’, whilst also not giving unrealistic ideas about the limits of different solutions. For example, I was regularly forced to remind myself where the barriers to change were technical (there’s only so much biomass available to use as a fuel), political (gas is cheap and electricity is expensive), or psychological (most of us are reluctant to embrace change, particularly when it controls how we keep warm).
Sophie (energy analyst, Regen): Contributing to this collaborative project was a valuable learning experience for me; refining how I communicate and consider different methods of engaging the public with the scientific and socio-political concepts of decarbonising heat. I found particularly interesting and perhaps a bit surprising how quickly we were having deeply personal conversations around heat technologies in the sessions we ran with the wider team. I think this aspect, the intimate reality of people making their homes warmer spaces, is often underappreciated.
Karenza (artist in residence): For me, this project was primarily about communication, both in research and result, and making a little contribution to the dissemination of knowledge at large. I think there was some initial tension in my practice deciding how to navigate between a scientific and artistic approach to tackle the subject. It was a slightly daunting process of trying to clearly capture a large amount of technical information, whilst trying to honour the incredible care that I encountered by those trying to improve our heat system. This resulted in a new route altogether, which blended both the personal and the technical, the artistic and the scientific.
Karenza: During the course of this residency, I discovered a whole world which I never knew existed. It has been an incredible learning experience and privilege to have had access to Regen’s resources, to have their energy experts patiently explain very complicated systems to me, and to be able to speak with Community Energy members. In my conversations, I fluctuated between pessimism and optimism on the subject: on one hand continually discovering new challenges that exist in our current energy system, but on the other, finding out that there are countless people working hard to solve these problems and help each other.
Ultimately, this residency has made me want to collaborate and engage with more people outside of my known sphere, and has highlighted the incredible value in collaborating and communicating across disciplines and industries.
Sophie: It was no easy task for Karenza to work from scratch and to visually capture the dynamic and personal facet to a topic that is sometimes thought to be slightly dull. Yet, I think the rich learnings I got from our collaborative process and Karenza’s creation of personified heat technologies which ignite conversation show that it has been an important and successful exploration to pursue.
Mark: Through astute questions and active listening, Karenza mapped out new ways of thinking and engaging with decarbonising heat. The characters that she has created are for me a brilliant new take on technologies I would consider ‘old friends’, bringing them to life with personalities that ring true to their roles and capacities in our energy system. I am sure that this project will help enliven people’s interest in what can be a bit of a dry topic, and I hope, help them understand it even better.
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