ICT and social practices

Lecturer: Hanna Hasselqvist

Content: Social practices shape our lives, e.g. how we live, how we move around, what we eat and what we buy. Practices change over time and differ between different contexts, and today many of our practices in the Western world are linked to an extremely high use of resources. To address this, ICT has been used for e.g. monitoring, giving feedback on and optimising what we do, but that alone is not enough to transform our current practices to more sustainable ones. During the lecture we will look at examples of projects on sustainable transportation and energy use in homes to see how practices shape our resource use, and what the role of ICT could be in shifting the focus from influencing individuals and their choices to supporting change in social structures.

About: Hanna Hasselqvist has a background as designer and is now a PhD student at the Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) department. Her research interest is in the use of design and ICT for moving towards a more socially and environmentally sustainable world.

Literature:

- Strengers, Y. (2014). Smart Energy in Everyday Life: Are You Designing for Resource Man? Interactions, 21(4), 24–31.

- Scott, K., Bakker, C., & Quist, J. (2012). Designing change by living change. Design Studies, 33(3), 279–297.