Materials Exchange Portal Development

This summer, Dsposal won a contract to work with ReLondon on developing a prototype Materials Exchange Portal (MEP) to aggregate listings of construction materials from the growing field of online materials exchange platforms.

The built environment is accountable for over 10% of London’s consumption-based emissions and is the city’s biggest producer of waste. ReLondon has partnered with a consortium of 31 organisations across four cities (London, Copenhagen, Hamburg and the Helsinki region) to work together on the Horizon 2020-funded ‘Circular Construction In Regenerative Cities’ (CIRCuIT) project to tackle this source of waste by promoting circular and sustainable construction practices in cities.

Develop

Dsposal was commissioned by ReLondon to develop a functioning ‘Materials Exchange Portal’, which at a basic level will:

• Enable users to find materials available for reuse that can be used in their construction projects, and
• Enable existing platforms to extend the reach of their listings of reusable materials for use by others in the city.

We believe that user research and user centred design is critical in building digital solutions that work for people in the real world. ReLondon wanted to ensure this project was developed with user needs at the heart of it. For this project our users are those seeking materials, those selling/offering materials, the existing materials exchange platforms, and ReLondon and the other CIRCuIT partners.

Partnership

To inform the development of the MEP, we partnered with Resource Futures to run a series of online workshops to understand users’ needs when searching for or listing surplus construction materials. You can read our report of the findings from those workshops by clicking the button below.

Open report

We also engaged with a number of existing materials exchange platforms so we could understand their technical needs and the outcomes they wanted. It was important for us to explore the functionality that ReLondon and the CIRCuIT partners would need in terms of managing the portal. From this research we were able to come up with a technical spec for the prototype and a build strategy.

Prototype

The prototype will be launched before the end of the year and following a successful trial will be rolled out across the four cities in the CIRCuIT project. If you’re a materials exchange platform that would like to be integrated into the MEP, get in touch with us!

It’s been great working with the team at ReLondon. We love working with clients with shared goals around making the circular economy a reality and in their words ‘revolutionising our relationship with stuff’. If you have interesting problems to solve or projects in this space and would like to see if Dsposal could help you, get in touch.