Grants and residencies

Research

From Do-it-yourself to Do it ourselves: A participatory design intervention for youth empowerment and energy commons

Application summary

Youths are one of the key stakeholders of climate justice. However, they are largely excluded in shaping collective endeavors to tackle climate change both in academia and real-world situations. Particularly, low-carbon energy transition discourses dominated by technological and adult-centered perspectives/practices tends to underestimate the youth’s power and commitment to social change. Recognizing this challenge and the urgency of empowering young people to engage in climate actions, this doctoral research will develop and optimize a set of participatory design interventions. By employing pragmatic methods, primarily action research and triangulation, this research aims to change students’ perception and behaviors on renewable energy toward commons. This study also evaluates the long-term effects of the intervention at the students’ school communities to identify the most effective approaches, tools, and principles possible for youth empowerment and their community-based actions on renewable energy. The findings of this research will benefit students and educators, and contribute to the growing literature on collective actions on climate change. Ultimately this research will identify the value of ‘a designerly way of knowing’ to address the socio-material-technological matters and achieve a just transformation towards a sustainable future.

This project explores how making renewable energy together can transform schools into energy communities that build, invest in, and co-govern renewable energy systems, and how participatory design can support this collaborative and transformative process. While the research initially focused on youth participation in school-wide collective energy actions, it became evident early on that youth participation hinges on “learning together” approaches that include a wide range of school members—teachers, principals, school administrators, and peers. To address this, I developed and conducted a Participatory Design project, named “Making Energy Together”. This project provided a hands-on, co-design workshop for school members to collaboratively design, construct and utilize renewable energy technologies. Drawing on a Research through Design approach and ethnography-informed methods, I traced the lifecycle of sixteen renewable energy technologies built in five schools in Finland and South Korea. This process involved not only their construction but also usage, maintenance, and decommissioning. This research makes clear contributions to the fields of Participatory Design, community energy transition, and technology and design education in several ways. It advances the understanding that the ongoing material engagement with energy technologies can facilitate the emergence of school-based energy communities. However, this requires careful attention to how this material engagement, entangled with diverse social elements, supports or interrupts repositioning schools as energy communities. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of Research through Design as a robust method for studying and facilitating sociotechnical transformation for sustainable energy futures. Lastly, I propose five design principles for policymakers, educational administrators, and teachers to guide the experimental implementation of inclusive, participatory energy transitions within schools.

Back to Grants listing