The smart grid is expected to encompass the overall electrification of society, while simultaneously managing increasing amounts of renewable energy. This could significantly impact how everyday life will be organized. However, previous research has shown that the envisioned role of households in the future energy system remains obscure and even contradictory. In this article we further examine and critically analyse how households as a demand response resource are imagined in the Swedish future smart grid. We focus on policy documents from the Swedish energy sector. To guide our analysis, we use the critical policy analysis framework of “What's the problem represented to be?” (WPR) for inspiration. Aligning with prior research, our results show that households tend to be framed as an untapped flexibility resource where heating and smart home technologies are to be controlled automatically or through remote control, which households allow for, motivated by consumption feedback, price signals or other incentives. Topics silenced in the problem representation include: The paradox in transitioning into a sustainable energy system while simultaneously sustaining unsustainable norms; a lack of diversity and acknowledgement of non-technical households; how trust and control need renegotiation and alternative ways for citizen participation in the energy transition.

Power shortages and fluctuations in electricity supply are expected to become more frequent in the future, as renewable energy increases in the electricity mix. This poses a problem in that electricity might not always be available at the time of demand for industries as well as for households. Demand flexibility in households has been brought forward as part of a solution to this problem. How to engage households in this, however, is still unclear. Actors have tried to liken demand flexibility with waste sorting and other altruistic activities with connotations of contributing to the benefit of society, rather than being an activity springing from economic motives. In this article, we use design fiction to critically explore what this analogy would mean in the context of household electricity consumption. We describe fictive user scenarios for cooking, charging the electric car, laundry & dishes and heating to draw the demand flexibility analogies to the forefront. By exemplifying and concretizing these scenarios, it becomes evident that using waste sorting as an analogy for demand flexibility is not realistic. We discuss the implications of the scenarios in relation to the current visions that inform the development of the smart grid, and the emerging services and service providers. We conclude that there is a need to challenge the current images of flexible households in the smart grid in order to design systems that support thriving within limits.

A regenerative thriving future within limits will require a change of social practices. Such a change will however not come by itself, and it is safe to state that computing in different forms and shapes will be critical. In this paper we evaluate a start-up in the form of an online platform supporting peer-to-peer storage space rentals. We will present and analyse their service and discuss the current and future prospects for systems in this genre, in light of the transition to a post-carbon future society. The analysis is grounded in a user study evaluating the system in its current form. We argue that services like the one offered by these types of companies could function as a type of 'transition service' in the sense that they are perhaps an interim self-obviating system that enable people to get accustomed to a new way of thinking about current unsustainable practices (in this case storage practices and sharing of storage), but eventually might become unnecessary/superfluous as a new ecology of storage practices comes into place. Hence, it might be important for these services and the companies behind them to prepare for this eventuality, for example by diversifying their business offer.

The transition into the future electricity system builds upon the inclusion of more intermittent energy sources in the grid, requiring electricity consumption to adapt to production. Households are pointed out as playing an important role, carrying a potential for being flexible in that their electricity use may be adapted to the supply of the grid. This contribution focuses on how expectations on households from industry and agencies align with reality of everyday life. We explore the relation between expectations and reality through the concepts of activity and awareness, frequently mentioned by stakeholders, and what the concepts imply for households’ participation. Results from three separate studies are highlighted: 1) Document analysis of stakeholder expectations on households; 2) Interviews with stakeholders; 3) Interviews with 16 households with a new smart meter. 

Results from study 1 and 2 show that stakeholders envisage households to become more active and flexible in their electricity use. However, what this entails is only vaguely expressed. Stakeholders may intend activity to mean time-shifting electricity usage, and that this would be attained if households had detailed information about their electricity consumption. Still, it remains unclear whether the activity of households denotes households temporally, and manually, shifting their chores or whether technology would mediate the shift. In the latter case, technology would serve as a flexibility mediator, possibly through automation. Home equipment, e.g. heat pumps, would be controlled without households’ active participation. Concurrently, grid operators signal passivity of households as a benefit – households don’t need to bother as the operator promises to take care of everything. Nevertheless, results from study 1 and 2 show that although automated control of household equipment may lessen the burden of manual time-shifting electricity usage, there is a consensus that households need to be made aware of their electricity use through feedback enabled by a smart meter and mobile apps. Stakeholders indicate an ambivalence in what to expect from households – manual shifting of activities, automation generating the shift, or awareness through feedback on electricity use? Some stakeholders hold that awareness is enough – whereas others hold that awareness only is a means towards an end of time shifting action. 

Study 3 shows that some of the interviewed households are indeed active and aware but not in the way that stakeholders envisage them to be, and regardless of their technical interest or energy awareness. For example, some households were active in monitoring their electricity meter to check the accuracy of the electricity bill. They wanted feedback, albeit more nuanced than how stakeholders imagine, e.g., on appliance level and feedback explaining increase in consumption. Some engaged in time shifting by manually unplugging appliances and running the washing machine during night. Some also expressed thoughts on being active in the way that stakeholders imagine: “But [operator] cannot load nor empty my washing machine”, indicating that there is more to load balancing than turning on an appliance. However, study 3 mainly highlight the heterogeneity between and within households. Households are active regarding the focus of everyday practices, in which electricity consumption is viewed as a means towards this focus rather than an end. They differ regarding their motivations, use of technology, everyday context, their knowledge, and energy use. 

To conclude, our studies point to a gap between how stakeholders view the role of householders in the energy system and the reality of the daily context of householders. To bridge this gap, heterogeneity of householders needs to be addressed. This plays a central part in pursuing democratic values, allowing for citizens to participate on equal terms in a sustainable future grid.

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.

To play is a legitimate need of urban citizens, and it is therefore important to enable play in cities and to plan for making cities playable. The playable city is not dependent on the digital technologies offered by the smart city. The playable city “happens” when a city offers suitable (playful) affordances and citizens engage in and make use of them. This ultimately implies that also ‘non-smart’ cities can be playable (and may indeed already be so). In this chapter we explore the intersection of playable and sustainable cities. We argue that the playable city can be placed within the realm of what the sustainable city should be and should aim for. The issue of whether this is achieved by applying digital technologies thus becomes decentred, even though digital technologies at the same time could open up for new and exciting possibilities. Key is to ensure that the playable city is a sustainable city and we should therefore aim for designing and building sustainable playable cities.

This paper presents an augmented reality smart city gaming concept, Magic Run. Magic Run has entertainment value and fulfills its’ original brief, but several aspects of the game were found to be problematic during a workshop with smart city researchers. We present problematic aspects of the game as well as ideas for how to redesign the game to control or ameliorate problematic interaction between future smart city players and bystanders.

The ongoing and escalating urbanisation has resulted in a situation where a majority of people worldwide live in cities. Cities stand for a substantial part of the world GDP and are often lifted as possible drivers of sustainable development. However, the city has limitations and vulnerabilities. Cities depend on resources flowing into the city and increasing populations strain their land use. Climate change threatens cities with sea-level rise, heat waves and extreme weather events. Transforming cities into Smart Sustainable Cities by incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming a recurring proposed solution to these limitations and challenges. The two main areas where ICT are envisioned to function for this are i) as part of the city's infrastructure for monitoring, efficiency and automatization of processes, and ii) as an enabler for sharing of both information and goods among citizens, expectedly leading to more sustainable urban lifestyles. However, there are several limits to the realisation of the Smart Sustainable City. Manufacturing, implementation and maintenance of its digital infrastructure hold environmental risks and require human and natural resources. Furthermore, there are issues of increased vulnerability of the city due to increased complexity. Already now, the (global) flows that the city depends upon to thrive, are to a large and increasing extent possible due to -And dependent on - ICTs working without disturbances. Considering the fragility of these systems, both physical and virtual, is the Smart Sustainable City a desirable or even feasible path? We suggest that while ICT may be useful for making cities more sustainable, we need to be heedful so as not to make the city even more vulnerable in the process. We suggest that we should make sure that the ICT systems simply assist the cities, while maintaining analogue backup in case the ICT shuts down; that we should build more resilient ICT systems with higher backward compatibility; and that we should acknowledge increasing complexity as a problem and strive to counteract it.

ICT, information and communications technology,has radically transformed our world and is now an inextricable partof what it means to live a normal life as a citizen, at least in highincomecountries. This has led to a situation where ICT has becomeso taken for granted that it has lost its visibility. While thisdevelopment to a large extent has been driven by businessopportunities, there is now also an increasing recognition of ICT as apossible solution to sustainability problems. There are however twomajor pitfalls of using ICT as a tool for sustainability that need to beaddressed for its potentials to be realized. The first pitfall isenvironmental impacts of ICT, as well as the risk of lock-in effectsand an increasing vulnerability. The second pitfall concerns theunderstanding of ICT as a neutral solution, rather than recognizingthat ICT, as all technology, carries implicit values. Taken together,these two pitfalls imply a need for replacing the atomized and technobiasedunderstandings of ICT with an approach that recognize thelarger socio-material, political and economic structure in which ICTis (thought to be) part. With the aim of contributing to such a shift,this paper proposes a practice-oriented perspective in order toexplore the potential of ICT to contribute to sustainability, using thesmart sustainable city discourse as our example. We define theconcept ICT practices and discuss it from an interdisciplinaryperspective and in relation to the sustainable smart city. We arguethat by using ICT practices as a conceptual starting-point foranalysis, both the technological and the socio-cultural components ofthe smart sustainable city discourse can become elicited, enabling amore explicit analysis of what assumptions this discourse rests on.