Refiguring digital interventions for energy demand reduction: Designing for life in the digital–material home
Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Val Mitchell, Garrath T. Wilson, Tracy Bhamra · 2020
This chapter deals with approach to design and intervention that builds on the ability of anthropological ethnography to open up new ways of knowing the world, and that attends to digital media as part of this world. It suggests a reconfiguration of the relationship between theory, research and design intervention that draws on phenomenological anthropology and design research approaches. The chapter explores what happens when the apparent dichotomy of digital presence and affordances and human action and improvisation is both disrupted through ethnographic research and utilized by designers. Social scientists in particular have been critical of both the utopian notion of digital technologies as providing all answers to energy demand reduction questions, and of the simplicity of the above human/technological agency dichotomy.