Digital Energy Futures: Foresights for Future Living

”Foresights for Future Living”, responded to a brief developed within the Digital Energy Futures project, created by the academic team and our energy sector research partners. The brief was to develop a design ethnographic futures method, and employ it to generate new knowledge about possible future everyday home life, and recommendations for future energy systems and services. It focused on three areas, determined through earlier stage of design ethnographic futures fieldwork and energy sector priorities, to investigate possible: place-based electric vehicle futures (2030); home-based clean air technology futures (2030); and future everyday routines in extreme weather (2050).

In response to the brief a new participatory design futures workshop method was innovated, enabling participants to experience elements of, explore and propose possible everyday electric vehicle, air technology and extreme weather futures. The method produced new knowledge which was analysed alongside knowledge from our industry futures visions review, futures ethnography futures and a survey. This was used to propose alternative visions of future everyday life, to ”re-frame” the entrenched assumptions that inform exisiting approaches to futures in the energy sector, and as such to deliver a new energy supply and demand design challenge which would account for everday life.

The project’s commercial significance is in guiding the energy sector through alternative framings of the technological, environmental and social challenges they face, and delivering new understandings of everyday energy use in 2030 and 2050. The environmental and societal significance of the project has been to deliver new recommendations for designing for inclusive everyday futures where: the air we breathe is safe and clean while protecting the environment from the climate damaging trajectories of clean air technologies; how to ensure electric vehicles and charging are accessible; and everyday life routines will change in extreme weather futures.

1) The ”Digital Energy Futures Foresights for Future Living” report, documents how people will live in possible futures, and the implications of this for energy futures and reframes the dominant visions for energy futures by combining knowledge from future vision analysis design ethnography, design research, and surveys. It innovates a report design using text, illustration, photography and graphics which is industry-accessible while evidenced by rigorous research. 2) The ”Design Anthropological Foresighting” article, published in the Q1 peer reviewed journal ”Futures” outlines and demonstrates the theoretical, conceptual and methodological innovations developed through this project and the new design anthropological practice that it has established. 3) The methods and findings of the ”Foresights for Future Living” report are relevant beyond the Digital Energy Futures project. They have been: shared widely across the energy sector in Australia, formed part of an exhibition at Energy Consumers Australia’s Foresighting Forum; adapted to a subsequently commissioned project; and have proved relevant beyond the energy sector, to companies and academic researchers interested in future home life, and the future of electric vehicles. 4. The ”Design Anthropological Foresighting” methodology is transferable and scalable and has been engaged in subsequent funded projects concerning automated work, net zero and mobilities.