This session considers the structuring of consumption through the design of objects and how this relates to changing practices. Each paper reviews the relationship between consumers and the (sometimes environmentally problematic) devices, technologies and services they have come to take for granted. Rather than viewing consumption as the end point of production we want to investigate the manufacturing of demand and the ways in which consumers are constructed along with the goods and services they are expected to require.

This session exploits ideas developed in social studies of science and technology. Reflecting on key texts from this field, Mika Pantzar suggests that designing for sustainability requires a fundamental re-think of the ways consumers and producers are represented and incorporated within processes of product design and marketing. How do consumers and producers interact in the process of innovation and what does this mean for sustainability?

Mika investigates these issues with reference to the spread and development of computer and digital technology into the household: how well do product development and marketing personnel really understand the requirements of end-users and how are future markets and consumers constructed? For Margrethe Aune, the task is to better understand the diverse meanings, practices and technologies involved in the domestication of (often unsustainable) energy consumption in order to influence policy and practice. Finally, Jaap Jelsma asks how product development might incorporate values like sustainability and how consumers might be involved in co-shaping a range of household appliances.

Mika Pantzar

"So to stay in rhythm, Intel must create "new uses and new users" -which is in fact the company’s slogan for keeping the market in sync with its own pace" (Eisenhart, Brown, 1998, 65)

The basic question of the current design discourse and digital future - most notably in human computer interaction research - is: how the black-and-white dichotomy of producer-consumer can be replaced by new forms of interaction between producers, trade, and consumers? How the novelty products of the information society are produced conceptually? What is the role of designers? How should consumers be represented and configured in design process?

The commodities of the first wave - the telephone, electric household appliances, radio and television, and the automobile - were developed already about a hundred years ago. Along with the second wave in the 1990s, communication and digital technology which was originally produced for military and later for business purposes, is spreading to households in the form of such as computers, information networks, and digital television and digital radio.

Although households have an essential role in shaping the use of technology, scenarios concerning the future of information technology still assume a technological perspective in which households feature as adaptable users and/or passive recipient. For example, there were only a few studies of consumer demand for the high-definition television, which was launched with such high hopes, or for the pan-European television channel, even though questions of demand might be assumed to be more decisive than those of technological development.

Our notion of technology is surely not as black-and-white as it was for Thomas Edison who actively opposed, for example, the use of moving pictures and gramophone records as entertainment. But how well do the product development and marketing personnel of manufacturing firms really understand the requirements of the end users? What kind of misconceptions or blind spots are there in this respect? For instance, I would argue that we are currently witnessing the birth of a global amusement paradise, not a politically respectable knowledge society.

Rather than talking about consumers, most designers tend to speak of users, usability and of different types of use. This modernistic view of human beings is primarily task-oriented and only secondarily experience-oriented (Pantzar, 1996, 2000a; 2000b). The user makes use of the machine; the machine does not make use of the user. Is it the linguistic asymmetry that makes it impossible for "machines to use people"? However, the increasing interactiveness of smart machines is one of the core changes in future technology and design. The pessimistic view is that machines which are capable of learning in interaction will lead to completely new kinds of human-machine dependencies. Although we speak euphemistically of "machines that learn and are customized to the user’s preferences", we are dealing with a completely new level of dependency.

Technology does not develop as a one-way process from the designer's desk into the hands of the consumer. Inventions are born and domesticated in a certain social and political context. Creating a consumer and a use for the product are central elements in the invention process – and not just at the end. Steve Woolgar refers to this process as user configuration. User configuration leads to the formation of a "script" (manuscript of correct use) which the consumer follows when faced with a novel product. From the manufacturer's point of few, creating a need and a market for the product is as important in the domestication of technology as is technical inventiveness.

My normative message can be summed up in the following arguments and concepts:

1) The interrelationship between producers and consumers in an innovation process must be intensified in order to promote products that better meet the needs of consumers. See, for example,

• User as collaborator (Margolin, 1995)
• Users as producers (Wickström, 1996)
• Constructive technology assessment (Rip et al., 1995)
• Role of active experimenter (Orfel, 1995)
• Contextual Design (Beyer, Holzblatt, 1997)

2) The perspective must be focused on the user configuration and the scripts of consumption, both in product development and marketing, but also in innovative pioneer households. Innovative consumers are often the ones to define and determine the uses of new products which later become established.

• User Configuration (preconception of users and use)
• (Woolgar, 1994, 1996)
• Social construction of the user (Bardini, 1995; Pinch, Bijker, 1987)
• Appropriation (Silverstone, 1996)
• Script formation (Ackrich, 1992, 1995)
• Technology as text (Woolgar, 1996)
• Open objects (Orfel, 1995)
• Product milieu (Margolin, 1995)

3) The future consumer is not a market waiting for products, but rather the producers and consumers construct the future consumer, needs and market on the basis of their expectations and actions. The potential of new technology is often not revealed until it is used (Gershuny, 1992; Pantzar, 1996, 2000b; Rosenberg, 1995).

A number of studies of household energy consumption have shown that lifestyle and everyday practice are important explanatory factors in understanding increases in private energy consumption. In spite of this, the dominant view of the user/household within energy policy is that of a rational consumer – an economic actor who will respond to information. To design effective policy it is important to work with a more subtle understanding of energy consumers. To get such an understanding we need to study the practices and meanings of everyday life through qualitative research.

This paper explores aspects of energy consumption and everyday life in Norway with the home as an analytical focus. The study is based on 34 open-ended interviews with different kinds of households. The core concept in the analysis is that of domestication, a concept developed "in between" social studies of science and technology, media studies and cultural studies (Silverstone et al 1989, Berg 1996, Lie & Sørensen 1996). Domestication is a fruitful metaphor when investigating the consumption of technology for it refers to the mutual shaping of users as well as products (jmf. Berg 1996). In "Bringing Energy Home" the concept of domestication can illuminate both the processes whereby houses are turned into homes, in which everyday life is, in turn, adapted to the house. The home is, so to speak, the outcome of a process of domesticating the house. As this theoretical focus indicates, my interest lies more in the process than the home as a physical artefact. I therefore examine activities as well as attitudes, things and technologies, including the results of energy consuming technologies like heat and light.

As Hal Wilhite et. al have pointed out in previous studies, Norwegian homes reflect our value for cosiness (Wilk and Wilhite 1985, Wilhite et. al 1996). We invest a lot of time and money in turning the house into a proper home. Important in the construction of cosiness is a high indoor temperature, an open fireplace and a lot of lights. We seldom put out the lights when we leave a room and we prefer to wear light clothing indoors, even in the coldest part of the winter. In addition the ideal is a detached house as a basis for the home. Norwegian homes, defined thus, are very energy consuming.

Even if this is the dominant ideology, we are not all alike. Not all Norwegian homes relate to this ideal. By highlighting alternative ways of constructing the home, we can track other lifestyles. In my project I identified three archetypal homes that illustrated the process of domestication as well as the results:

• the home as a haven
• the home as a social arena
• the home as a never ending project .

Analysing different ways of domesticating the house and of making a home gives us a better understanding of the role of energy and provides important insights into the content and rationale behind different lifestyles. These are important when developing strategies designed to change or reduce private energy consumption (whether through political action or technological development). Taking consumers to be rational actors and thus focusing on the price of energy is a mistake. Knowledge of how Norwegian homes are domesticated promises to contribute to an understanding private energy consumption and so to the design of more effective consumer-related policy.

Jaap Jelsma

Concepts like market success or failure put the fate of products in the hands of consumers who are conceived of as the passive recipients of goods. Within technology studies, such concepts are increasingly criticised for their black-boxing of the mutual shaping of technical scripts and consumer needs. In his introductory comments on this session, Mika Pantzar instructively summarises this critique and channels it into a threefold normative message:

• producer/consumer interaction should be intensified in all stages of product development to meet better the needs of consumers
• product development and marketing should focus on user configuration
• markets should not be seen as fields of passive consumers to be conquered by new products but as constructs developed interactively on the basis of expectations and actions of both consumers and producers.

In my contribution, I want to enrich this highly relevant message by extending its normative load to include the question of sustainability. A market, though constructed interactively, is still just a market. And a market is limited with respect to values. That is, both parties constructing and consuming goods are primarily acting in their own short-term interests. Markets tend to neglect the externalities they produce, i.e. their effects for third parties and the environment, even if such effects threaten their own survival in the longer run. One of the problems of modernity is to link micro decisions about the production and consumption of goods to their macro effects such as the production of greenhouse gasses.

Following Boudon, one might conceive of production/consumption junctions as internally closed systems driven by a compelling economic logic and by the expectations of people. Strengthening this junction will not automatically produce a better world. When producers learn to understand consumers better, this may simply speed up the development of the global amusement paradise. Like markets, consumer needs are constructs too, and ones which are also co-shaped by the products on offer. Before the advent of the mobile phone, we were not aware of the urgent need for people to call distanced others regardless of location, while often being completely indifferent to what that means to those nearby.

According to Boudon, closed systems which neglect their environments provoke aggression that leads to feedback to which the system has to react. Such counteractions from the outside used to be channelled through the political system resulting in all kinds of regulation, but presently come more and more from new pressure groups such as Greenpeace. My question is, whether such counteractions can be anticipated and can be built into design/use processes from the very beginning in a structural way. That is, how can product development incorporate values like sustainability, and what does that mean for the role of consumers? As citizens, people may welcome ecofriendly products, but as consumers they may resist them as soon as they perceive these products to interfere with their autonomy to behave as they like.

A possible answer might be the development of a new paradigm connecting design and use processes conceptually, but incorporating a normative viewpoint from the beginning. The outline of such a paradigm might be as follows.

Owners of goods are not passive consumers, but active users engaged in all kinds of household practices on the basis of specific logics which are often unconscious. In these practices they collaborate routinely with devices and appliances which co- shape, by the logic underlying their design, the ways in which users interact with them. Thus consumption of water, energy and electricity can be seen as the outcome of collaborative practices between two types of active partners, (wo)men and machines. By conceiving of them in this way, processes of design and use are linked, and their logics revealed. We can now start to think in an informed way about how this dual process can be optimised from a normative point of view (for example with the goal of conserving energy) that caters to the logic of use. Taking up such a viewpoint has substantial as well as procedural consequences for the design of design processes.

I will illustrate this normative, use-oriented design paradigm by giving examples from fieldwork and trials in the domain of household appliances.

In combination, the papers in this session examine consumers’ roles in processes of design and innovation and in the use and appropriation of domestic technologies. Though they have this in common, the practical implications differ. While Margrethe suggests that energy policy should be refined to "go with the flow" of current practice, Jaap looks for ways of deliberately re-engineering the interface between technology and practice in support of environmental goals. What are the "moral messages" inscribed in the houses of today, how did they get to be so, and to what extent are they subverted or modified through processes of domestication?

Online papers

Akrich, Madeleine (1992) The De-Scription of Technical Objects. in Bijker, Wiebe, John Law (1992) Shaping Technology/Building Society-Studies in Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.).

Akrich, Madeleine (1995) User Representations: Practices, Methods and Sociology. in Rip, Arie, Thomas Misa and Johan Schot (eds.) Managing Technology in Society. The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment. Pinter Publisher, London.

Bardini, Thierry (1995) The Social Construction of the Personal Computer User. Journal of Communication, 45(3) Summer, 40-65.

Berg, Anne-Jorung (1996) Digital Feminism. (A Gendered Socio-Technical Construction: The Smart House). senter for teknolgi og samfunn. norges teknisk-naturvitenskaplige universitet, Rapport nr. 28.

Beyer, Hugh, Karen Holzblatt (1997) Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs. Morgan Kaufman Publishers.

Boudon, R., La logique de la sociale, introduction à l' analyse sociologique, Librairie Hachette, Paris 1979.

Burgelman J.C. Issues and assumptions in communication policy and research in Western Europe: a critical analysis. in J. Corner, P. Schlesinger and R. Silverstone (eds.) Handbook of Mediapolicy. Routledge, London, 1997

Eisenhardt, Kathleen, Shona Brown (1998) Time Pacing: Competing in Markets that Won`t Stand Still. Harvard Business Review, March-April, 59-69.

Garnham, Nicholas (1996) Constraints on Multimedia Convergence. in Dutton, William H. (ed.) (1996) Information and Communication Technologies. Visions and Realities. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Gershuny, Jonathan (1992) Postscript: Revolutionary Technologies and Technological Revolutions. kirjassa Consuming Technologies, Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, Roger Silverstone & Eric Hirsch (toim.), London and New York, Routledge, 227-233.

Lie and Sørensen (1996), ‘Making Technology Our Own?’, Scandinavian University Press, Oslo.

Margolin, Victor (1995) The Product Milieu and Social Action, in Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin (eds.), Chicago and London: The University Press of Chicago.

Orel, Tufan (1995) Designing Self-Diagnostic, Self-Cure, Self-Enchanging and Self-Fashioning Devices. in Buchanan, Richard and Victor Margolin Discovering Design. Explorations in Design Studies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Pantzar M. (1994) Do Commodities Reproduce Themselves Through Human Beings? World Futures-Journal of General Evolution, Vol. 38, 201-224.

Pantzar Mika (1996) Kuinka teknologia kesyntyy. Kulutuksen tieteestä kulutuksen taiteeseen. (How technology is domesticated, in finnish) Tammi Press, Helsinki.

Pantzar, Mika (1997) Domestication of Everyday Life Technology: Dynamic Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts. Design Issues, Vol 13, No. 3, Autumn 1997, 52-65.

Pantzar, Mika (2000a) Consumption as Work, Play and Art - Representation of Consumer in Future Scenarios. Design Issues, Vol. 16:3, Fall, 2000.

Pantzar, Mika (2000b) Tulevaisuuden koti. Arkisia tarpeita keksimässä. (Inventing the need for future home, In finnish) Otava, Helsinki, 2000.

Pinch, Trevor.J. , Bijker, Wiebe.E. (1987) The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other. In Bijker W.E., Hughes T., Pinch T.J. (eds.) The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..

Rip, Arie, Thomas Misa and Johan Schot (1995) Managing Technology in Society. The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment. Pinter Publisher, London.

Schulze, Gerhard (1995) The Experience Society. Sage. London.

Silverstone, Roger (1996) Future Imperfect: Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life. in Dutton W. Information and Communication Technologies. Visions and Realities. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Wikström, Solveig (1996) The customer as co-producer. European Journal of Marketing, Vol 30, No. 4, 6-19.

Winner, Langdon (1996) Who Will Be in Cyberspace. The Information Society, 12: 63-72.

Woolgar, Steve (1994) Rethinking the Dissemination of Science and Technology. Crict Discussion Paper No. 44, May 1994.

Woolgar, Steve (1996) Technologies as Technological Artefacts. in William H. Dutton (ed.) Information and Communication Technologies, Visions and Realities.