A Year in Energy: Imagining Energy Community Participation with a Collaborative Design Fiction

TY - GEN

T1 - A Year in Energy

T2 - Imagining Energy Community Participation with a Collaborative Design Fiction

AU - Jensen, Victor Vadmand

AU - Christensen, Emmelie

AU - Hansen, Nicolai Brodersen

AU - Jensen, Rikke Hagensby

PY - 2024/10/13

Y1 - 2024/10/13

N2 - Citizens are increasingly envisioned as active participants in sustainable transitions. One vision imagines digital civics as energy communities wherein local actors collectively produce and consume renewable energy. As energy communities are an emergent sociotechnical phenomenon, HCI is in a great position to understand and shape potential dilemmas that may influence citizens’ digitally supported participation. This paper presents the collaborative design fiction A Year in Energy to engage people in imagining communal energy futures. Inspired by Participatory Design, A Year in Energy combines design fiction’s storytelling with hybrid digital board game elements to manifest visions of energy community participation. We conducted three board game workshops, where participants reflected on sociotechnical scenarios and actions. Our analysis identified four dilemmas of participation describing participants’ reflections on imagining communal energy. We contribute knowledge on dilemmas of energy community participation and considerations for using collaborative design fiction to foster the imagination of digital civics participation.

AB - Citizens are increasingly envisioned as active participants in sustainable transitions. One vision imagines digital civics as energy communities wherein local actors collectively produce and consume renewable energy. As energy communities are an emergent sociotechnical phenomenon, HCI is in a great position to understand and shape potential dilemmas that may influence citizens’ digitally supported participation. This paper presents the collaborative design fiction A Year in Energy to engage people in imagining communal energy futures. Inspired by Participatory Design, A Year in Energy combines design fiction’s storytelling with hybrid digital board game elements to manifest visions of energy community participation. We conducted three board game workshops, where participants reflected on sociotechnical scenarios and actions. Our analysis identified four dilemmas of participation describing participants’ reflections on imagining communal energy. We contribute knowledge on dilemmas of energy community participation and considerations for using collaborative design fiction to foster the imagination of digital civics participation.

KW - civic life

KW - design fiction

KW - energy communities

KW - future technologies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85206588982&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3679318.3685355

DO - 10.1145/3679318.3685355

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 979-8-4007-0966-1

BT - NordiCHI '24: Proceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

ER -