Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation

TY - GEN

T1 - Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities

T2 - The CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24)

AU - Jensen, Victor Vadmand

AU - Laursen, Kristina

AU - Jensen, Rikke Hagensby

AU - Smith, Rachel Charlotte

PY - 2024/5

Y1 - 2024/5

N2 - Increasingly, research projects narrate visions of energy communities that portray hopes of more sustainable, democratic energy futures. However, it remains unarticulated how such research narratives are embedded in the design of digital technology for communal energy futures that are situated in everyday life. While sustainable HCI has identified relevant design narratives, little attention has been paid to those of communal energy projects. In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.

AB - Increasingly, research projects narrate visions of energy communities that portray hopes of more sustainable, democratic energy futures. However, it remains unarticulated how such research narratives are embedded in the design of digital technology for communal energy futures that are situated in everyday life. While sustainable HCI has identified relevant design narratives, little attention has been paid to those of communal energy projects. In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.

KW - design narratives

KW - discourse

KW - energy communities

KW - energy community

KW - energy technologies

KW - future

KW - participation

KW - sustainability

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85194827838&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3613904.3642609

DO - 10.1145/3613904.3642609

M3 - Article in proceedings

BT - CHI 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Sytems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

CY - New York

Y2 - 11 May 2024 through 16 May 2024

ER -