Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation

Increasingly, research projects narrate visions of energy communities that portray hopes of more sustainable, democratic energy futures. However, it remains unarticulated how such research narratives are embedded in the design of digital technology for communal energy futures that are situated in everyday life. While sustainable HCI has identified relevant design narratives, little attention has been paid to those of communal energy projects. In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.