Designing Eco-Feedback Systems for Communities: Interrogating a Techno-solutionist Vision for Sustainable Communal Energy

The notion of establishing energy communities where householders collectively participate in using renewable energy is highly topical. In this paper, we interrogate a design vision of sustainable communal energy developed through a techno-solutionist narrative. The vision is exemplified in a recommendation-based mobile app, the Community Energy Planner app, that provides individual and collective energy feedback on renewable energy actions. To obtain insights into how householders understand and experience embedding such recommended communal energy feedback into domestic energy-consuming practices, we deployed the app with six households for one month. Through a qualitative study, we report on householders’ experiences living with the app on an individual and at a community level. Our findings are presented in four themes, revealing that recommended feedback on individual and collective energy actions is challenging to align with the messiness of domestic life. Finally, we discuss alternative design visions for sustainable communal energy. The main contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) a field deployment study of a techno-solutionist narrative of communal energy facilitated through an app and, 2) a discussion on alternatives to this design vision.