Aiming to miss: lessons for design research from the study of everyday energy practices

This paper argues that the historical focus of design research on the design process designers themselves, their activities, decisions and rationale conceals many design-relevant phenomena that emerge in the use of products and systems. With regard to designing for sustainability, these phenomena become vital, since sustainability is itself a use practice. We present a set of vignettes from an ethnographic study of peoples everyday energy practices, in an effort to show how consumption is grounded in the intersections of various elements, including architecture, habit and social values. This gives pause to reconsider designers roles in determining (through products and architecture) such patterns of energy use, and leads us to recommend that a different kind of scenario, i.e. one that aims to miss the deliberate and intended use, may be helpful in sustainable product design. We conclude with a discussion that outlines how the study of mundane practices of use might be instructive for agendas and concepts in design research, particularly those of framing and design intent