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.

In response to research concerns that smartphone usage negatively impacts intimate relationships, this paper presents a study exploring how design can encourage smartphone accountability in family home settings. We developed and deployed three provotypes with seven families via a Research through Design study intended to encourage reflections on ubiquitous and routinised smartphone usage. The provotypes progressively explore ways of making smartphone use visible by facilitating individualised accountability, competitive accountability, and collective accountability. We present insights into how these provotypes shaped family practices based on a qualitative study with 26 participants. We found that, by emphasising different forms of shared accountability, the provotypes reduced smartphone use, which in turn fostered family intimacy and togetherness, rooted in meanings of caring and sharing. Finally, we discuss our study’s implications for how provotypes can help explore forms of accountability in practices involving sustainable technology use within the home.

Digital data shape work practices as they travel through space, time, and social situations. In turn, workers shape the materiality of data through different data-oriented activities. In this paper, we draw on theory of data journeys to develop and present a conceptual framework of four data-intensive activities: Producing, mobilising, processing, and re-purposing. Together, those activities capture entanglements of data transformations and data-intensive practices. We develop the framework through a qualitative study of digitisation in Environmental Assessment (EA) practice. EA practitioners reflect on their experiences working with digital environmental data through ten semi-structured and two interactive interviews. The paper offers two main contributions. First, we develop a data journey theoretical framework and show that it is useful as a unit of analysis for uncovering tensions in data-oriented activities. Second, we use these insights to outline a set of tensions for future design activities in the area of data work practices.

In this pictorial, we conceptualize how modern designs take on the roles of either ‘devices’ or ‘things’ to shape everyday practices in fundamentally different ways. Drawing on Borgmann's device paradigm and provocative design, we visually recount how two designs, starting from the same brief using the same materials ultimately culminate in a ‘device’ and a ‘thing’. As householders embedded the two designs in their sustainable practices, different design qualities emerged. We use these householders’ experiences to discuss how ‘spicing up’ a design process with elements of provocation can help people engage more deeply with environmental challenges.

Mobile devices are fast becoming an integral part of family life. While mobile technology provides constant connectivity to a world outside the home, it inevitably disrupts family dynamics and the social notion of being together. In this paper, we explore "non-use" of mobile technology in a family setting. To do this, we designed the Pup-Lock provotype, a design provocation intended to challenge established expectations and practices around mobile device use at home. We report on a five-week in-depth study of using Pup-Lock with three families reflecting on their mobile device usage and their experience of non-use. Our findings illustrate how mobile use shapes social expectations and how over-use creates tensions in families. We contribute by showing how provoking non-use through design results in desirable and meaningful ways to increase family interaction. We discuss implications of designing for non-use to challenge established domestic practices around technology use.

Within sustainable HCI research, we have witnessed a growing interest in studying interaction designs that support households to 'shift' energy usage to times when it is sustainably favourable. In this paper, we investigate shifting through a purposely provocative and scripted design, which challenges the idea that renewable electricity is an always-available resource for households to consume. To do so, we made electricity for washing laundry either free or not available. We conducted a detailed qualitative study with four families that experienced our intervention for a month. We present five themes that illustrate how families adapted, reflected, and formed new routines and expectations related to washing practices. We discuss the broader implications of combining scripting and provocation as a means to intervene, disrupt and understand energy consuming practices within the home.

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of hygge as a low-energy design vision for the smart home. Hygge is a Danish concept that embodies aesthetic experiences related to conviviality, often shaped by orchestrating atmospheres through low-level lighting. To explore this vision, we probe two Australian households that already live with smart home lighting technology. We report on household reflections of embedding hygge into everyday life. We conclude by outlining future directions for exploring desirable and sus¬tainable smart home visions.

Research has shown that desirable designs shape the use and experiences people have when interacting with technology. Nevertheless, how desirability influences energy consumption is often overlooked, particularly in HCI studies evaluating the sustainability benefits of smart home technology. In this paper, we present a qualitative study with 23 Australian households who reflect on their experiences of living with smart home devices. Drawing on Nelson and Stolterman's concept of desiderata we develop a typology of householders' desires for the smart home and their energy implications. We structure these desires as three smart home personas: the helper, optimiser and hedonist, which align with desiderata's three approaches to desire (reason, ethics and aesthetics). We use these insights to discuss how desirability can be used within HCI for steering design of the smart home towards sustainability.

Shifting is an energy-conserving interaction strategy for moving energy consumption to times where it is sustainably favorable. This interaction strategy is attracting increasing interest within sustainable HCI studies. While most of these consider how interactive technology can change household behavior, only a few report on how shifting is experienced in everyday life when assisted by automation. In this study, we investigate an interactive technology that assists households to shift electricity consumption to times when electricity is cheap or more sustainable. Our study was conducted as a long-term field deployment for 6--18 months with eight households, each living with an interactive prototype that shifts running times for a heat pump within user-defined boundaries. Our findings show that managing heat pumps toward assisted shifting was well-received by all households because it was a convenient way to shift electricity consumption. Shifting electricity use facilitated price savings of 6.8–16.9%. Nevertheless, our findings also reveal a conflict between the system design, and how householders actually interact with their heating system and experience assisted shifting. Based on the eight households’ experiences, we present three overall themes of convenience, control, and complexity that each describes different aspects of long-term real-life use of automatic technology assisting households to shift electricity use. We discuss the broader implications of these findings and the role of design and future sustainability technology in everyday life.

Recently within HCI, design approaches have appeared, which deviate from traditional ones. Among them critical design introduces deliberate provocations in order to challenge established perceptions and practices. We have engaged ourselves with this design approach out of interest in understanding how to use provocation in research through design. Towards this end, we report on a field study with four families that used an aesthetically, functionally and conceptually provocative future probe. The purpose of the probe was to challenge existing energy consuming practices through provocation and make its users reflect on them. The paper describes how all three provocative aspects were addressed, and our findings demonstrate how they were experienced in the real world, and how they impacted our research through design approach. We conclude by presenting reflections on how to design provocations, and reflections on the impact of provocations for research through design in general.