This thesis introduces and critically reflects on a design programme, Storyforming, that explores ways to design objects and places to enrich daily life narratives. Using an experimental design approach, the goal is to exemplify and explore this idea with discursive artefacts that, through their physical and temporal form, act as catalysts in the construction of meaningful experiences.

In the current sustainability discourse, behavioural change has been pointed out as a key factor in achieving a sustainable society. Historically, design has been very effective in increasing production and consumption behaviours by creating new types of needs and, in a way, manufacturing desire (Forty, 1986). Drawing on this, the overarching aim of this thesis is the investigation of the ways design, through a suggested programme, can afford alternative types of meaningful experiences in contrast to the prevailing consumer culture.

The empirical work reported in the thesis stems from several research projects looking into the matter of energy use in relation to design. In addition, two of the projects have been carried out in the author’s own design practice. Some concepts are explored more in-depth—involving events such as field studies, situated interviews, workshops, prototype building, design interventions in the form of domestication probes, and contextual studies ranging from a few weeks up to a year—while other concepts exist only as sketches or photo montages. The diversity of these concepts, the design experiments, helps span a design space becoming a new provisional design programme. The idea for this programme has evolved from observations and reflections made throughout the experiments presented in the thesis.

The general results are the suggested approach of Storyforming, which focuses on the design of artefacts supporting daily narratives that can be used to create engagement, meaning, and alternative values applicable to the discourse of sustainable behaviour.

Specific contributions are the selection of design experiments. In the thesis, the experiments have first been examined from the perspective of stories and forming as a basis for the new programme formulation. Through this articulation of the programme, the experiments are revisited through three leitmotifs, part of the provisional programme focusing on different properties related to the aspect of forming. From the perspective of the user, these themes—seeing and accessing designs, exploring and expressing complexity, and sharing experiences and negotiating use—are finally elaborated on in relation to other theoretical concepts as well as their implications for future research.

This thesis presents a collection of experimental designs that approach the problem of growing electricity consumption in homes. From the perspective of design, the intention has been to critically explore the design space of energy awareness artefacts to reinstate awareness of energy use in everyday practice. The design experiments were used as vehicles for thinking about the relationship between physical form, interaction, and social practice. The rationale behind the concepts was based on a small-scale ethnography, situated interviews, and design experience. Moreover, the thesis compares designer intention and actual user experiences of a prototype that was installed in nine homes in a residential area in Stockholm for three months. This was done in order to elicit tacit knowledge about how the concept was used in real-world domestic settings, to challenge everyday routines, and to enable both users and designers to critically reflect on artefacts and practices. From a design perspective, contributions include design approaches to communicating energy use: visualizations for showing relationships between behaviour and electricity consumption, shapes and forms to direct action, means for turning restrictions caused by energy conservation into central parts of the product experience, and ways to promote sustainable behaviour with positive driving forces based on user lifestyles. The general results indicate that inclusion is of great importance when designing energy awareness artefacts; all members of the household should be able to access, interact with, and reflect on their energy use. Therefore, design-related aspects such as placement and visibility, as well as how the artefact might affect the social interactions in the home, become central. Additionally, the thesis argues that these types of artefacts can potentially create awareness accompanied by negative results such as stress. A challenge for the designer is to create artefacts that communicate and direct energy use in ways that are attractive and can be accepted by all household members as a possible way of life.

Electricity consumption has been rising significantly in the western world the last decades and this has affected the environment negatively. Efficient use and more energy conservative usage patterns could be ways to approach this problem. However, electricity has for a long time actively been hidden away and it is rarely thought of unless it ceases to exist. From the perspective of critical design, we have been working to find methods to visualise electricity and electricity consumption in everyday life to promote environmentally positive behavioural change. In this paper, we are looking at how aspects of lifestyles can be used in design as central driving forces that could lead to changed behaviour. Attempts to promote behavioural changes related to energy consumption might be successfully carried out when people are offered desirable alternatives that are engaging and that do not impose a perceived extra burden in their everyday life. This argument is exemplified through two design concepts, the AWARE Laundry Lamp and the Energy Plant, which are examples on how to increase people’s energy awareness and offer them means for reducing their energy consumption in the home. Both prototypes are inspired by current trends in lifestyle as well as actual observed user behaviour.

New interfaces to the energy system can facilitate changes of habits and provide means to control the household’s use of energy. In this paper, we look at energy use and such interfaces in the home from a socio- technical perspective. We describe how interviews and user observations can be used in combination with the theory of domestication to inform and inspire the design of interfaces to the energy system. As a result of our approach, we present the Energy AWARE Clock, an example of a new type of electricity meter that challenges the norm of how the electricity system is typically represented in the home. The Energy AWARE Clock makes use of a clock metaphor to visualise electricity-use in relation to time in everyday life. Energy-awareness products always challenge domestic social patterns and it is important to consider these aspects in the design process to find successful solutions for the future. 

'Ab|Norm' inquires into the presence and use of energy in public. Many functions and forms of electricity have long been 'naturalized' into our habitual actions and cultural norms. Consider how the lighting in our streets and parks conditions what activities we can do and when, what a neighborhood identity is like or even how safe we feel. We may not always take notice of the electricity present — much less accompanying values and consequences. Ab|Norm sketches urban interventions in order to discuss such issues with stakeholders. A series of concept designs has been produced in the form of cards, which have already been the basis for a participatory workshop with architects, artists and engineers.

Smart electricity meters and home displays are being installed in people’s homes with the assumption that households will make the necessary efforts to reduce their electricity consumption. However, present solutions do not sufficiently account for the social implications of design. There is a potential for greater savings if we can better understand how such designs affect behaviour. In this paper, we describe our design of an energy awareness artefact – the Energy AWARE Clock – and discuss it in relation to behavioural processes in the home. A user study is carried out to study the deployment of the prototype in real domestic contexts for three months. Results indicate that the Energy AWARE Clock played a significant role in drawing households’ attention to their electricity use. It became a natural part of the household and conceptions of electricity became naturalized into informants’ everyday language.

There is a potential for greater electricity savings if we can better understand how design affects behaviour. This paper describes om design of an energy awareness artefact - the Energy AWARE Clock- and discusses it in relation to behavioural processes in the home. The Energy AWARE Clock showed to play a significant role in drawing households' attention to their electricity use. It became a natural part of the household and conceptions of electricity became natmalized into informants' everyday language.

The artificial world is part of an on-going negotiation of meaning, manifesting in social practice. From a sustainability perspective it is thus important to critically examine what norms are imprinted into the artificial, as well as to imagine, materialize and suggest artefacts that could afford more sustainable stories and practices to form. The project Sensing Energy is an attempt to explore how design could contribute to a re-imagination of everyday life and society, as well as what imaginaries (artefacts and related stories) could come out of such an endeavour. A critical and speculative design programme comprising the three leitmotifs Natureculture, Microsizing modernity, and Focal things and practices, provided a frame and foundation for a series of design experiments. The resulting artefacts were presented at two different workshops in which participants were asked to form stories that integrated one or more of the design experiments into their everyday life. Based on the material from the workshops we can conclude that the design experiments worked well as parts of or catalysts for new stories of the everyday.

This paper explores the border between technology and design (form giving) from a feminist perspective. Looking at the energy system and how it has been integrated in the household, we want to address the underlying structures that have been built into the ecology of electrical appliances used in daily life, preserving certain norms that could be questioned from both a gender and a sustainability perspective. We have created an alternative electricity meter, the Energy AWARE Clock, addressing design issues uncovered in an initial field study. In this paper, we will make parallels to these issues. We also use feminist technoscience studies scholar Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg in order to clarify useful concepts that can be derived from feminist theory and that can act as important tools for designers engaged in creative processes. From our own experience with the Energy AWARE Clock this approach has great potential for questioning and rethinking present norms within sustainability and gender, from the viewpoints of design research and design practice.

This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern sociotechnical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.

We need to transition our society in a more sustainable direction, for example through enormous cuts in carbon emissions. Yet this future is hard to envision and work towards. In this project, with a transition design posture, we have designed tools that we believe can be useful to initiate dialogues and reflections for the future. In particular we are interested in using the bridging between provocative and affirmative design as a way to explore and articulate what people see as the lost and found of such a transition. In this paper, we present a study where we used a practice lens to address one possible low carbon future through a provocation workshop. We present our methodology, the tentative tools we used during the workshop and the experiences as expressed by the workshop participants.

Increasing our knowledge of how design affects behaviour in the workplace has a large potential for reducing electricity consumption. This would be beneficial for the environment as well as for industry and society at large. In Western society energy use is hidden and for the great mass of consumers its consequences are poorly understood. In order to better understand how we can use design to increase awareness of electricity consumption in everyday life, we will discuss the design of Watt-Lite, a set of three oversized torches projecting real time energy statistics of a factory in the physical environments of its employees. The design of Watt-Lite is meant to explore ways of representing, understanding and interacting with electricity in industrial workspaces. We discuss three design inquiries and their implications for the design of Watt-Lite: the use of tangible statistics; exploratory interaction and transferred connotations.

People’s domestic habits are increasingly being targeted to reduce levels of CO2 emissions. Whereas domestic energy consumption has received a lot of attention with several reported studies on sustainable practices, there are very few studies on workplace practices. Nevertheless, these are considered as having much potential for reducing energy consumption. This paper presents the findings from two field studies where two different types of prototypes for visualizing energy use were designed, implemented and evaluated in different types of workplace settings – factories and offices. The studies used design probes to explore how visual feedback for electricity use was interpreted and acted upon by employees in work settings. A striking observation was that it is very difficult to get people to change to more pro-environmental behavior and practices in a workplace environment. The paper discusses why this might be the case.

The EnergyLife mobile interface incorporates lessons from environmental psychology and feedback intervention to relay information from appliance sensors, offeringa gaming environment that rewards usersfor decreased electricity consumption.

Vi måste acceptera den föreliggande verkligheten – endast därigenom har vi utsikt att förstå den, att relatera till den för att påverka den och skapa kultur som är ett smidigt redskap för omställningen.

Så inleds Vitiden – en energifiktion där övergången till ett mer hållbart samhälle utforskas i ett samspel mellan text och bild. I det framåtsyftande manifestet skissas Vitiden upp som ett svar på dagens ekologiska och sociala utmaningar. Manifestets höga tonläge och ambitioner kommenteras av en bildburen framtidsarkeologi, uppbyggd kring fiktiva fragment från framtiden. Infällda bilder ur acceptera-manifestet¹, vilket även parafraseras i Vitidens inledande stycke, sätter energifiktionen i relation till det modernistiska samhällsbygget och kritiken därav. En generös notapparat bidrar med ytterligare perspektiv.

Vitiden utforskar hur ett energi- och klimatmässigt hållbart Sverige skulle kunna te sig, med fokus på vardagslivets praktiker. Bokens titel Vitiden pekar på ett framtida samhälle där det gemensamma är centralt, och energi är en högt värderad resurs. Vitiden är baserad på ett av Energimyndighetens scenarion (Legato) ur framtidsstudien "Fyra framtider: energisystemet efter 2020".

Vitidens syfte är att bjuda in till samtal, reflektion och diskussion om hur vårt samhälle kan organiseras för att klimatmålen ska nås. Genom en kombination av text och bild skapas en komplex bild av omställningen som ger utrymme för såväl moraliska ställningstaganden, utopiska drömmar och vardagstristess.Vitiden är uppbyggd av fyra huvudsakliga delar:

1. Ett manifest, där vi ger scenariot Legato röst att tala om behovet av omställning i relation till fyra vardagspraktiker "Vi bor", "Vi äter", "Vi reser" och "Vi arbetar och har fritid".
2. En framtidsarkeologi, som representerar hur samhället och vardagslivet skulle kunna te sig om Legato infrias.
3. Inklippta bilder ur acceptera-manifestet som publicerades 1931, och som manade på funktionalismens och modernismens genombrott i Sverige. Denna omställning är av samma magnitud som den vi nu står inför, varför en samläsning av Legato och acceptera är intressant.
4. En notapparat där vi forskare kommenterar manifestet genom att hänvisa till forskning samt en liten dos poesi.

Vitiden är utvecklad av forskare vid Green Leap, KTH tillsammans med grafiska formgivare och illustratörer. Projektet är finansierat av Energimyndigheten.

¹ Asplund, G., Gahn, W., Markelius, S., Paulsson, G., Sundahl, E., Åhrén, U. 1980[1931] acceptera. Tiden förlag. Faksimil.

There is a lack of futures studies addressing consumption and lifestyles at the level of everyday life. This article reports on the transformation of the policy-orienting scenario "Legato", developed by the Swedish Energy Agency in 2016, to a practice-oriented design speculation. The article describes the process of transformation and the resulting energy fiction “Vitiden”. The transformation involved three acts of translation. First, the scope of the transition was explored in-depth, both quantitatively and qualitatively, providing a more detailed understanding of the gap between the 'sustainable' 2050 and today. Second, the scenario Legato was analysed for practices and elements of practices that could be elaborated to descriptions of how everyday life could play out in this future. The third step involved re-presenting the practice-oriented scenario as a design speculation. The design speculation was given the form of a book named “Vitiden - an energy fiction” in which the reformulated version of Legato is presented through text and images, combining a forwardlooking manifesto and a backward-looking future archaeology. Besides the written content and the pictures and illustrations of Vitiden, the design of the book is also part of the speculation as it embodies an exploration of how publications, including form, graphic design and choice of materials, could look like in a future such as Legato.