Materials Exchange Portal Development
This summer, Dsposal won a contract to work with ReLondon on developing a prototype Materials Exchange Portal, or 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 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
- 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 are 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 its heart. For this project, those users include people seeking materials, those selling or offering materials, the existing materials exchange platforms, and ReLondon together with 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 below.
Open reportWe 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 develop a technical specification 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 are a materials exchange platform that would like to be integrated into the MEP, get in touch with us.
It has been great working with the team at ReLondon. We love working with clients who share 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.
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