Co-Designing Sustainable Domestic Technologies

Did you know that the 5 apps running in the background of your smart phone equal the CO2 emission of a gasoline-fueled car driving 500 km? Probably not. For most of us it is incredibly difficult to understand the environmental footprint related to our digital consumption. This is not least due to the complex ICT-infrastructure that is needed to support people’s private use of digital technologies.

Co-Designing Sustainable Domestic Technologies was a 1-year funded education-based project that aimed at increasing our awareness and understanding of how much CO2 emission that is caused by digital consumption. The project was organized into 4 educational courses and involved more than 120 BA and MA students.

In collaboration with the energy and fiber net provider EWII and Aalborg University (AAU), the Social Design Unit set up a design brief for students at both AAU and SDU. Their task was to do ethnographic fieldwork in Danish households in order to produce actionable insights. Based on this research and co-design with families, students came up with concepts and prototypes demonstrating how people can use IT more cleverly to reduce their unsustainable digital consumption. Their projects were presented for EWIIs management.

Sustainable IT in a Critical Smart Home Perspective

A project made in collaboration with energy and fibernet provider Ewii and the living lab Future Home.

Project aim: to increase knowledge of the misfit between the “smartness” of smart home technologies and the messy practices of homing with a particular focus on people’s private energy consumption.

Why?

In Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) smart home technologies are expected to play a major role in the green transition. However, people are general-ly reluctant to embrace and use these technologies in their homes to support new environment-friendly forms of energy consumption. One reason is that smart home technologies are often designed according to engineering standards with little an-thropological understanding of family life and what a home is.

The project was carried out at SDU Kolding through 4 educational courses and field work in people’s homes. It resulted in 15 student projects presented to Ewii management. At the end, an exhibition was arranged to make the projects publicly available.

A SEMINAR ON DESIGN FICTION

The social design unit has previously worked with Danish authors Kaspar Colling Nielsen and Peter Adolphsen with the aim at exploring new ground conditions for design. Colling Nielsen’s dystopian vision of a Danish civil war (2018-2025) has been our starting point for a design-based inquiry into the as yet unknown socio-cultural consequences of the financial and economic crises; and Adolphsen’s speculations of a pandemic wrinkle fucking disease set stage in 2016 for a collective design and theatre performance.