Enough!? Exploring sufficient and fair energy use through design

The project will identify opportunities in striving for sufficiency and social justice through exploring what could be seen as sufficient and fair energy use related to personal needs and interpretations of climate goals. We want to understand the intersection – including synergies and conflicts – between individuals’ and organizations’ experiences of having done enough, understandings of having enough and also what is enough to reach climate goals.

We will develop speculative design objects – so called provotypes – to make visible and challenge norms around energy- and consumption patterns. The insights from the project will be the foundation for a tool that makes visible, explores, and supports energy sufficiency and justice in households and/or organisations. The tool is meant to be a support for energy advisers and similar actors in their work towards e.g., households, and the tool will be designed in collaboration with these actors.

In the longer run, the project wants to highlight the importance of energy sufficiency as a research topic and complement to existing energy research on e.g., energy efficiency. Sufficiency and socila justice can be considered problematic topics to discuss. Therefore, we hope that the project will also contribute to encourage more people to have open discussions about these topics, in order to broaden the discussion about how to achieve a sustainable energy system. Such discussions might also make it easier for future energy policies to include aspects of sufficiency.

The project is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency through their program Design for Everyday Energy Efficiency which is coordinated by SVID. The project partly builds on and extends a previous project on energy resilience, see Designing Everyday Energy Resilience.

The project is a collaboration with Helena Strömberg, Chalmers University of Technology, and Katharina Merl at the product design studio Boid.