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Materializing energy

Published: 16 August 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Motivated and informed by perspectives on sustainability and design, this paper draws on a diverse body of scholarly works related to energy and materiality to articulate a perspective on energy-as-materiality and propose a design approach of materializing energy. Three critical themes are presented: the intangibility of energy, the undifferentiatedness of energy, and the availability of energy. Each theme is developed through combination of critical investigation and design exploration, including the development and deployment of several novel design artifacts: Energy Mementos and The Local Energy Lamp. A framework for interacting with energy-as-materiality is proposed involving collecting, keeping, sharing, and activating energy. A number of additional concepts are also introduced, such as energy attachment, energy engagement, energy attunement, local energy and energy meta-data. Our work contributes both a broader, more integrative design perspective on energy and materiality as well as a diversity of more specific concepts and artifacts that may be of service to designers and researchers of interactive systems concerned with sustainability and energy.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    DIS '10: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
    August 2010
    457 pages
    ISBN:9781450301039
    DOI:10.1145/1858171
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 16 August 2010

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    1. design
    2. design theory
    3. energy
    4. materiality
    5. sustainability

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    • (2024)"If you don't feel guilty, you won't take responsibility" - Co-Speculating on Digital Technologies That Encourage Sustainable ConsumptionProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685374(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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