Paper Info
Title
From Awareness to Empowerment: Using Design Fiction to Explore Paths towards a Sustainable Energy Future
Abstract
This paper presents a novel application of participatory design fiction for sustainable domestic energy consumption. In our study we examine how social practices relate to a newly developed energy management system introduced to households. We explore how design fiction can be used to identify current design limitations and to showcase future design directions to overcome these limitations. In particular, we investigated how energy consumption feedback is leaving users in a state of \"helplessness\" despite raising awareness of their environmental impact. Through participatory fictional future story-writing workshops we identified five levels of empowerment that design for sustainability practitioners can engage with. Our proposal is to use those levels of empowerment to reframe sustainable design by shifting from behaviour to social practices and from awareness to empowerment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2675133.2675281
CSCW
Keywords
Field
DocType
social practices,activism,miscellaneous,energy management,sustainability,grounded theory,design fiction,empowerment
Grounded theory,Sustainable design,Participatory design,Design fiction,Computer science,Knowledge management,Domestic energy consumption,Energy consumption,Sustainability,Empowerment
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.54
35
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sebastian Prost1233.45
Elke E. Mattheiss2748.31
Manfred Tscheligi32567570.72