Agile Electrification is a UC San Diego Design Lab initiative — the lab founded by Don Norman — aimed at accelerating clean, abundant, distributed energy for California homes, with an emphasis on solar-led electrification. Its method is humanity-centered design: small, co-created interventions and agile development sprints run with industry experts and real residents, each producing open-source materials such as code, designs, and publications. Within this initiative, Junghwan Park led a sub-project in 2023–2024 focused on machine-learning modeling of home energy-load growth and on improving homeowners' energy literacy.
One barrier the project identifies is that the stakeholders in home electrification — homeowners, utilities, distributed-energy providers, and regulators — "don't speak the same language," a structural obstacle to progress. The initiative's responses include a shared open-source ontology (its "Golden Grid") meant to model the physics, finances, and policy of home electrification in common terms, and a focus on "customer energy literacy," where homeowners are often unsure how to manage and benefit from their energy. Park's sub-project sat squarely in this modeling-and-literacy space.
The modeling work ran into a concrete data obstacle: predicting the impact of home electrification typically needs residential utility-bill data, which is hard to obtain. The project's answer was to predict energy use without those bills. An open-source tool from the initiative, "bill-calibration," demonstrates a trained neural-network model that estimates a household's annual energy consumption from building characteristics — size, insulation, HVAC — and local weather patterns, comparing its predictions against true consumption. That approach lets electrification-impact analysis proceed without requiring each household's private billing data.
The significance is in method as much as outcome: a humanity-centered, open-source approach to a systems-level problem, where the technical work of energy-load modeling is paired with the human work of energy literacy and shared openly rather than held privately. Park's contribution was the sub-project within that larger effort — the energy-load modeling and literacy strand — rather than the initiative as a whole, which spans many collaborators at the Design Lab and its partners.