Research Project: Energy and Co-Designing Communities

How can new technologies be designed to support communities in reducing their energy consumption?

The Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) research team (Mike Michael, Bill Gaver, Jennifer Gabrys, Alex Wilkie, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovalle) at Goldsmiths, University of London would like to inform you of their new interactive website at www.ecdc.ac.uk.

As a collaboration between Science and Technology Studies and Design, ECDC seeks to
understand how new technologies can be designed to support communities in reducing their energy consumption. In particular, we are interested in getting at what is often neglected in studies of energy consumption and its reduction: the imaginative, playful, emotional and potential aspects of people’s use of relevant technologies.

We are working with existing communities engaged in reducing energy demand, to understand the range of perspectives and knowledge they embody. Using materials drawn from field trips, workshops, and probes, we will design novel devices and give them to participating communities to test in their own settings. These devices will be unfamiliar, playful, ambiguous but will hopefully expose new possible ways of thinking, doing and feeling in relation to energy consumption. We will visit our participants and study what they have made of our designs. We are also interested to see what sorts of discussions have been sparked off by our designs. To this end, we have also designed this website to encourage exchanges between our participants and between our participants and wider community.

We invite you to visit the website and we welcome all contributions whether they be comments on the project, reflections on the website itself, stories about your own experiences with energy reduction projects or technologies, or suggestions of additional resources or contacts. You can contribute by emailing us at info@ecdc.ac.uk or by registering as a user and blogging directly into the website.