Designing for the energy transition from INtuition to INtention

Abstract

The contemporary need for an energy transition simultaneously poses a challenge, an opportunity and an urgency. We are facing a polycrisis (Tooze, 2021) due to the international geopolitical context, the need for energy independence, increasingly widespread energy poverty, and the climate crisis. From a perspective of sustainability, the essay explores various design-oriented approaches, inviting a shift in traditional (primarily technical) focus from individual products to more systemic designs (with significantly greater social, behavioural, and economic impacts). The analysis thus ranges from the now entrenched idea of the energy community to more experimental cases that revolutionise the way energy can be consumed simply by doing more with less.