EIRES: Energy, imaginaries, design, and futures

EIRES - Eindhoven Institute for Renewable Energy Systems kindly invites you to join the thirteenth EIRES Lunch lecture on Friday 30 April 2021 | 12h00 - 13h00 (CET).

How do you imagine and understand energy? How do you picture energy transitions happening, in everyday life? Your knowledge and expertise probably lead you to have certain ways of thinking about—and understanding—the science and the technologies, which will affect how you act. But you also know that other people, from everyday citizens to government policymakers, will have different understandings of the subject, and different visions for the future. These imaginaries (to use a term from sociology), encompassing individual mental models but also wider societal-level conceptions of technologies and futures, can influence our behaviour and practices at multiple scales. Design research offers some practical ways of investigating imaginaries (and how they affect use behaviour and practices) which can help inform the energy transition, and also ways of bringing possible futures into more experiential forms of prototype, including consideration of the human factors of interaction with technologies at an everyday scale. In this talk, Dan Lockton will offer some insights from a range of projects around design approaches to energy, behaviour, and transitions.

Program 12h00 - 12h05
Welcome
by Richard van de Sanden - TU/e | EIRES

12h05 - 12h35
Energy, imaginaries, design, and futures
by Dan Lockton - TU/e | Industrial Design

12h35 - 12h55
Questions & Answers
led by Richard van de Sanden - TU/e | EIRES

12h55 - 13h00
Wrap up & Announcements
by Mark Boneschanscher - TU/e | EIRES

Register
Registration is mandatory

Location
Online | MS TEAMS

Next EIRES Lunch
21 May 2021

Previous EIRES Lunch
Summaries previous lectures

About Dan Lockton

Dr. Dan Lockton is a designer and researcher focusing on people's interactions with technology, and how that affects the way we think and behave, particularly around transitions to more sustainable futures. He joined TU/e as an assistant professor in the Future Everyday group of the department of Industrial Design in 2021 from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. Lockton has held research positions at the Royal College of Art, University of Warwick, and Brunel University, and through projects in the UK, Europe, and US, has collaborated with organisations including the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Philips, and Demos Helsinki. In relation to energy, he has been a postdoc on the Interreg SusLabNWE Living Labs project led by TU Delft, and a research fellow on the UK's CarbonCulture project. He has a BSc in Industrial Design Engineering from Brunel University, London, a Master's in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Design from Brunel, which led to Design with Intent, a design toolkit around behaviour change. Lockton also established the Imaginaries Lab, a research-through-design studio which is developing practical co-design and facilitation tools around imaginaries and futures.