Energy Resilient Dining: Sparking discussion about everyday energy resilience through design

Abstract

To reach the sustainability goal of the Paris agreement a sustainability transition in the Swedish energy system towards renewable resources is required. However, a renewable energy system brings with it challenges where electricity is more variable. Designing everyday energy resilience is a research project looking into ways of meeting this challenge. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to complement the research project by investigating how a variable power system affects the dining activity and explore ways to enable energy resilient dining in the future. The purpose was fulfilled through four objectives. First, to map out the dining activity today and in the future and secondly to identify what qualities are important for a dining experience. The third objective was to challenge today’s idea of the dining activity. Finally, the fourth objective was to through design communicate ways of enabling energy resilient and meaningful dining in a variable energy system. The dining activity that we have focused on can be described as several people, a household or friends for example, consuming food in a specific context to achieve a meal which fulfills the need of a meaningful dining experience. Within this dining activity exists three main actions, preparing, cooking and consuming a meal. There are three main qualities achieved through this activity, all of which contribute to a meaningful dining experience, the meal fulfills basic needs, social and cultural values and meeting infrastructure expectations. These qualities provide value that is deeply rooted in human behaviour and changes in values over the considered time span are likely incremental if any. The dining activity of today was challenged through the critical design provotype Pluggen, a smart branch outlet that varies the available electricity in the kitchen and challenges the status quo of always available electricity. The provotype was deployed as a part of the user research in this master’s thesis and provided insights into important values and strategies of being more energy resilient today. The result of the user studies and ideation in this master’s thesis is Thermo, a product that bridges the mismatches in the dining activity of today and communicates an energy resilient dining activity of the future. It supports the user in separating the actions of the activity and allows each action to be performed when most suitable.