Abstract: Energy efficiency retrofitting of public social housing is a key challenge for a more sustainable and inclusive society, alleviating energy poverty, increasing living conditions and indoor comfort quality of vulnerable households, improving dwellings and neighbourhoods. However, every action should be inspired by a “people-centric” approach. Within REHOUSE, Renovation packagEs for HOlistic improvement of EU’s bUildingS Efficiency, maximizing RES generation and cost-effectiveness”, Horizon Europe, ENEA coordinates a pilot case in Italy, in Apulia Region. Interventions on social housing will address both the active and passive components of the building leading to the improvement of the envelope insulation level, while locally producing RES electricity from the Building integrated Photovoltaic Panels located in favourably-oriented façades. PV will be coupled to renovated active energy supply based on the central heat pump, Biobased PCM storage. It is crucial that innovative technological solutions installation is based on occupants’ acceptance, including co-design elements, since end-users and even those stakeholders not used to participate in research/innovation projects become an integral part of the process. Households have been engaged since the beginning of the prototype specifications, through social requisites elicitation, and thanks to a social task force. The methodology has started from a mutual understanding, with interviews and questionnaires, this operation was carried out by experiences and surveys in presence and proximity (ethnographic approach). A bottom-up approach aims at achieving new behaviours in the future renovated dwellings. Therefore, starting from an empirical analysis of users’ needs we have acquired useful information to reach high level of acceptance of innovations. Notice: Full text: page 589 to 598 of the complete version of the proceedings: Behave Conference 2023 (enr-network.org)