In this article, we lever onmatters of concern(MoC) as a way to reflect on the articulation of collaborative design processes. We do this by focusing on an international project for the development of an ICT platform for energy management at the household and housing cooperative levels. We analyse retrospectively how the project development process captured and accompanied several MoC in two piloting areas, where all authors were directly involved. Our work contributes to the body of knowledge that builds on Science and Technology Studies scholarship to enrich the understanding of complex design processes. In particular, the paper goes beyond a descriptive take on MoC and provides ontological and methodological considerations on the use of user stories. Ultimately, the paper argues that scaffolding tools, such as user stories, can capture and convey MoC, and they can facilitate a transparent process of actor-networks alignment and emergence.

Integrating sustainability in computing education entails broadening the scope of the education, but how can that be done while maintaining student engagement? Climate change and species extinction can appear far removed from data structures and algorithms to say the least. In our ongoing work of integrating sustainability in our Media Technology programme, we have addressed this gap by introducing systems thinking games and activities to broaden the scope, as well as by situating the issues addressed in the course in relation to their future profession. In this paper, we present our experiences of introducing and playing systems thinking games, how the systems thinking exercise sessions were conducted, outcomes of the sessions and finally some lessons learnt. Furthermore, we present and analyse changes we did to the exercises and that led to a richer material for discussions in the classroom.

In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components—people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind—that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.

Businesses have historically had a negative impact on the environment by contributing to pollution, the increase of greenhouse emissions, neglection of responsible waste disposal, and deforestation among other things. In this paper we present an exploratory case study of an IT consultancy firm and their perspective and work with sustainable development. As a consultancy firm, the company does not provideservices directly to end users, but rather help clients in their business efforts. The aim with this project has been to explore how sustainability concerns can be integrated into the work processes of an IT consultancy firm, exploring both opportunities and challenges.

Transitions toward more sustainable mobility are necessary and involve changes in complex constellations of mobility-related practices. To understand opportunities for moving in this direction, there is a need to explore both the consumption side of sustainable mobility practices and the perspective of stakeholders that provide products, services, infrastructures, and policies required for such practices. This article contributes to a discussion of critical aspects of sustainable mobility practices in relation to the responsibilities and concerns of stakeholders with power to influence these practices. We present four sets of design concepts for supporting car-free living which were formulated and co-created based on a practice-oriented analysis of a one-year study of three families in Stockholm, Sweden that replaced their cars with light electric vehicles. The design concepts bring forward elements of sustainable mobility with a focus on: trying out new mobility practices, cycling infrastructure, child-friendly public transport, and transporting stuff. Furthermore, we discussed the concepts with public and private sector stakeholders and examined their interests in particular practices. Also considered are how the responsibilities of different stakeholders may clash. Finally, we suggest that practice-oriented design concepts can support discussions and increased knowledge about responsibilities and potential conflicts related to sustainable practices, as well as provide means for supporting learning about sustainable practices among decision makers.

Despite many contributions to Sustainable HCI stressing the importance of “moving beyond the individual”, a majority of HCI work is still targeted mainly at consumers or resource users. However, many stakeholders influence resource use and including such stakeholders in design work can open up new design opportunities for supporting sustainable practices. In this paper, we present results from a longitudinal study of practices related to energy improvement work in housing cooperatives. During the study, we discovered new opportunities for interactive technologies to support this work when we involved various stakeholders other than housing cooperatives. In addition, we discuss more general implications for design aiming to support diverse stakeholder engagement in practices related to resource use: which stakeholders and practices to include, temporal aspects of engagement, and opportunities for supporting shared responsibility for resource use.

Transitions of unsustainable everyday practices into more sustainable ones require new approaches to explore possible futures and encourage change. Trying new practices and experiencing alternative configurations of sociomaterial assemblages can increase reflexivity as well as assist in exploring potential futures. Design can assist in co-creating possible futures and bridging discussions about the preferred strategies to reach them. If sustainability is defined as an on-going process calling for dialogue, there could be potentials for using practice-based design research, and in particular co-design approaches, at the intersections of these dialogues. By analysing methods for reflexivity and collaboration in two design research projects within sustainable mobility, we here suggest design strategies for prototyping change at an individual level and communicating the experiences of such change to people with power to trigger and direct change. This may be particularly useful for addressing sustainability which both requires dealing with complex problems and extensive collaboration. 

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

The use of practices as a unit of analysis has been suggested in order to scale up efforts within sustainable HCI and to shift the focus from changing individual behaviours to supporting transitions at a societal level. In this paper, we take a practice approach to the case of sustainable transportation, and more specifically to car-free transportation. Car use is intertwined in many practices and managing life without a car is difficult, particularly for people in contexts where owning at least one car per family is the norm. We studied three families in Stockholm who replaced their cars with different combinations of light electric vehicles during one year. From the families' experiences, we identified a number of opportunities for designers of interactive technologies to support environmental pioneers in the particular case of car-free living, as well as to support transitions towards sustainable practices in general.

In the field of Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction, there are many examples of research exploring how ICT can be used to influence people’s energy use. Typically, this research focuses on domestic electricity use and on how to persuade individuals to reduce or change their use of electricity. However, the effectiveness of such approaches has been questioned and it has been proposed to look beyond the individual to the communities, corporations and governments that affect people’s practices. In my PhD work I have studied roles and responsibilities that could influence energy related practices for the cases of personal transportation needs and energy use in apartment buildings. I have also analysed how ICT, together with other interventions, could support a more sustainable use of energy and identified important design aspects for such support. These initial findings are presented and discussed together with suggestions for directions of future work.