Citizen Activities in Energy Transition
User Innovation, New Communities, and the Shaping of a Sustainable Future
- 176 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Citizen Activities in Energy Transition
User Innovation, New Communities, and the Shaping of a Sustainable Future
About This Book
This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and scienceand technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change.
Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens' active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engagedover the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation.
This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.
Frequently asked questions
1 Introduction
1.1 The changing image of energy citizens in sociotechnical change
1.2 Citizens in sustainable sociotechnical changeâa short history of reconsiderations
- Users are the sources of inventive new technologies in areas where the available products do not cater to their specific needs. Even though further development often takes place in R&D companies, the lead-user designs spur on new product lines and improve earlier ones (von Hippel, 1976, 1988). In renewable energy, this has been found to be the case in wind turbines (Karnøe and Garud, 2012; Nielsen, 2016) and solar collectors (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006).
- Users have been a vital source of information for developing new design versions as respondents to marketing research ever since the 1930s (Marchand, 1998). In sustainable energy this has been the case with passive houses (Rohracher, 2003; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013).
- Users can act as design partners, as experts on their own work, and as design decision makers regarding the conditions of their everyday life (Bjerkness, 1987; Bødger et al., 2004). In small-scale renewable energy technology (S-RET), some evidence of this can be found in grassroots innovation (Smith et al., 2016a, 2016b; De Vries et al., 2016).
- Users also improve early designs through learning-by-using, both locally and through feedback to producers (Rosenberg, 1979, 1982; Lundvall, 1988; Lundvall and Vinding, 2005). In sustainable energy innovation this has been the case with solar heaters and woodchip burners (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006).
- Early adopters have a strong influence on what direction uses of new technologies and social organization around them take, as well as on the norms governing them. This can affect potential alternative technologies and technology-related citizen activism as well as early phases of mainstream technologies (see, e.g., Bijker, 1995; Fleck, 1993a, 1993b; Flichy, 2007; Akera, 2001; Schwartz-Cowan, 1983; Fisher, 1992). In renewable energy such influence can be observed in the community energy movement as an alternative technological discourse (Hargrieves et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2016b), as well as in how user experiments gradually led to the mainstreaming of wind turbines in Denmark (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013; Nielsen, 2016).
- Users can also actively oppose or passively reject new technologies, or they can undermine their intended effects by failing to use them according to expectations (Akrich, 1992; DeSanctis and Poole, 1994). In S-RET this has been observed with added heating and cooling to passive house concepts in many countries (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2003; Palm and Derby, 2014).
The next set of reconsiderations emerged over the course of the 1990s, when the emergence of more flexible home and workplace information technologies made researchers realize that users alter and adjust technology-in-use more than had been assumed. The emerging more open and flexible development processes did not result in a similarly âclosedâ technology, as had been the case in the earlier mass-manufacturing era. The most important findings can be characterized as recognizing the commonness of the active shaping of technology-in-use and cyclical development of technology:
- Studies of home consumption revealed that instead of being passive adopters, ordinary consumers were active in adapting the configuration and meaning of the technologies to make them work (Silverstone et al., 1992; Lie and Sørensen, 1996). They were, by default, domesticating technology into the moral economy of the household and contributing to the long-term taming of new types of technology. Further research has since shown this to take place beyond ICTs (Miller and Slater, 2007; Berger et al., 2006). There is some evidence of the active domestication of sustainable energy solutions and even âdomestication pathwaysâ from one S-RET to another (Palm and Derby, 2014; Juntunen, 2014; Nyborg, 2015).
- Studies of workplace information systems showed that selective appropriation, integration into other devices, the co-evolution of practices and new technology, add-on solutions, new uses, (re-)inventions, and efforts to market the technology were, in fact, very common (see, e.g., DeSanctis and Poole, 1994; Alter, 2006; Szymanski and Whalen, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 1999). In sustainable energy such adaptation has been documented to some extent prior to the present line of study (Heiskanen et al., 2015; Raven et al., 2008; see Chapters 3 and 4).
- Home multimedia and workplace ICTs showed how more advanced peers, âwarm experts,â were central in educating other users (Bakardjieva, 2005), as were semi-professional âlocal expertsâ who seconded their help in addition to their main jobs (Stewart, 2007; Voss et al., 2009), becoming âuser-side innovation intermediariesâ (Stewart and Hyysalo, 2008). In sustainable energy, user-side intermediation has been documented but seldom conceptualized thoroughly (Heiskanen, johnson, et al., 2010; Raven et al., 2008, 2015; deVries et al., 2016; Meelen et al., 2019).
- It was further realized that many new technologies did not follow linear patterns where the design becomes âclosedâ before it starts to diffuse (Fleck, 1993a; Williams et al., 2005) but involved innofusion, that is, iterative loops between design and use, often lasting as long as several product generations (Pollock and Williams, 2008; Hyysalo, 2010). Usersâ domestication and alterations can thus shape the technology, both at local adopter sites and through entering the many feedback loops that circle between suppliers and users. In sustainable innovation this has been discussed by Heiskanen et al. (2014) and under the headings of learning-by-using (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013) and user assemblages (Nielsen, 2016).
The third and most recent reconfiguration in the understanding of the role of users in technological change has resulted in the rapid proliferation and sophistication of digital-sharing platforms throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The ensuing changes can be characterized as user contributions becoming boosted through new digitally connected peer communities:
- Previously unconnected users have formed communities of interest on the web that share and iterate designs. Such user-innovation communities have proliferated far beyond open-source software and are designing many products without suppliers (Tapscot and Williams, 2008; Jeppesen and Molin, 2003; von Hippel, 2016). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 4), but after our research others have identified it as well (Meelen et al., 2019).
- Manufacturers, in turn, are busy setting up their own user-innovation community efforts (Jeppesen and Fredriksen, 2006; Fuller, 2006; Pollock and Hyysalo, 2014). Living labs, web-based innovation areas, and user groups mark some of the widespread practices through which users are actively connected to each other and to producers in order to facilitate company research and development activities (Johnson et al., 2014; Leminen, 2015; Hyysalo and Hakkarainen, 2014; Mozaffar, 2016). This has not been reported in sustainable energy innovation to date, but is likely to emerge.
- User-configurable content and derivative designs have become more commonplace, particularly in social media applications, games, and mass-customized products (Benkler, 2006; Tapscot and Williams, 2008; Botero et al., 2010). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 3).
- Internet user forums, blogs, and discussion platforms have allowed users to pool their experiences and reveal their designs to other users. This has led to a âdo-it-yourself renaissance,â in which self-created and collectively created artifacts are gaining new impetus (see, e.g., Kuznezov and Paulos, 2010; Grabher and Ibert, 2014; Kohtala, 2017; Kohtala et al. 2020). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 3), but since then, it has also been recognized elsewhere (Meelen et al., 2019).
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Endorsements
- Series
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Author biography
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Citizens in energy innovation and sociotechnical change
- 2 The biographies of artifacts and practices methodology for the study of sociotechnical change
- 3 Initial focus: User innovation in sustainable energy technologies
- 4 Broadening the inquiry: New Internet-based energy communities
- 5 Zooming out: User activities and the series of configurational movements in energy transition
- 6 Conclusions and implications for management and policy
- Appendix 1: Data and methods on renewables innovation and adoption in the Finnish energy system
- References
- Index