How will rewiring today's choices around electrical grids shape tomorrow's communities?
2022 Notable Design for Social Impact, Core77 Design Awards
2022 Notable Service Design, Core77 Design Awards
2022 World Changing Ideas, Honorable Mentions, Fast Company
"As an anthropologist, I see grids as ever-changing infrastructures that are not static but alive with culture and alive with us. As we change, they change, and this is especially true and necessary right now. It is widely agreed that the 2020s will be the decisive decade to ‘fix’ global warming. The lowest hanging fruit in this process is greening the electricity system. If you pull the fossil fuels out of the electricity system you make great strides toward carbon neutrality—but upending our power sector, while necessary, requires rethinking everything."
-- Gretchen Bakke, PhD, from the Lucas J. Daniel Perspective in Sustainable Systems
As consumers, we rarely think about electricity—until it isn’t there. We plug a cord into an outlet and expect it to produce power. But the system that delivers energy to our phones, appliances, and lights is built on 150-year-old technology that’s being pushed to its limits. And when the system gets overloaded, the results can be devastating.
Take, for instance, the winter storms that left 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses without power as freezing temperatures and snow blanketed the state in February 2021. Millions of Texans had no heat, water, or lights for days because extreme weather caused by climate change had reduced the total power generation capacity for the main state electricity grid by half.
Blackouts are just the beginning of the problems when it comes to the way we generate and distribute energy. About 60 percent of electricity generated in the US comes from facilities that burn fossil fuels—coal, natural gases, petroleum, and other gases—to produce energy. This polluting, aging, increasingly unstable, and underfunded infrastructure also requires maintenance (the costs of which are passed on to consumers) and is susceptible to cyberattacks.
Key Words: #sustainability, strategic design, system thinking, community study, #data and computational prototype, #behavioral
BACKGROUND: A unique perspective on a complex problem
What role does design play in greening our electricity system? How can it address contemporary challenges at the intersection of social, environmental, and economic systems?
Researchers at IIT Institute of Design (ID) responded to these questions, using design to envision a more sustainable energy infrastructure under the advisory of Dr. Carlos Teixeira, Charles L. Owen Professor of Design.
Designing and planning for an optimized energy infrastructure of this scale, composed of myriad interdependent and connected systems, is an extremely difficult task. The sheer complexity of it can stymie its pursuit and ultimately delay our transitions to new, resilient, and sustainable energy futures. Perseverance and tenacity is the name of the game here: transitioning to a more sustainable energy future cannot be achieved through fragmented efforts. Instead, we must purposefully align the products, services, organizations, and policies at all levels of this system.
The Illinois Tech Mies campus provides a useful model for such thinking: to tackle global issues, ID students started thinking locally. They built on the existing work of their friendly neighborhood microgrid, which powers buildings, eliminates costly outages, minimizes power disturbances, moderates an ever-growing demand, and curbs greenhouse gas emissions.
If the ultimate goal is to mitigate climate change by transitioning to a renewable energy system, you have to start with rethinking the systems of delivery. You have to reimagine the electricity grid itself.
INTRODUCTION: Taking on the system
The first step in such a process is generative prototyping, a design practice that focuses on experimentation and learning through doing. Through cycles of rapid iteration, our team built physical objects to communicate ideas, generate questions, and provoke critique. These physical objects helped make the problem tangible. The process also allowed us to explore sustainable solutions through different lenses such as equity, circular economy, and anti-racism. With multiple rounds of prototyping with mixed teams, we shared ideas and ownership of the solution—all with minimal bias.
The resulting design models (expressed as anatomy of infrastructure, archetypes, and action situation) were used to consider three core questions:
How can microgrids support production, consumption, and disposal of energy to minimize environmental disruption and ensure energy resilience?
How can microgrids create and activate local resources and grow local economies?
How can microgrids create equitable modes of communal engagement?
In other words, what is necessary to realize the promise of the microgrid as a civic infrastructure, one that binds communities to self-organize and holds themselves collectively accountable for making purpose-driven choices?
EXPLORATION: System of solutions
Our exploration centered on the choices that could shape a new energy paradigm: one that would move toward sustainable energy sourcing and lead to equitable outcomes for communities. Our discoveries consolidated into three complementary themes that propose ways to recombine our shared resources through infrastructural design interventions, reimagining microgrids as civic infrastructures:
1. Diversifying Energy Sources: We propose a tactical activation of existing resources such as spaces, technologies, and cultures through new features that can advance collective stewardship of energy infrastructures. Buildings manage (produce, control, exchange, store, etc.) their energy and communities prioritize sustainable generation by recycling the grey energy that is otherwise lost, contributing to surplus energy generation that can be sold.
2. Advancing Energy Democracy: The emerging affordances and capabilities of microgrids can strengthen civic engagement beyond the energy sector. An essential lever for this is energy education: the proposed Energy Hub Co-op is an institution where community members can gain the skills and knowledge necessary to govern the local energy infrastructure. The Digital Community Square and its embedded algorithms afford visualizing and conceptualizing community data for the community members to reimagine new ways of addressing emerging energy needs.
3. Growing Local Economy: Our sustainable solutions create opportunities for residents to self-select options that suit them best and self-organize through the P2P networks and platforms. Collective capacity of community members and the economic potential of their assets are strengthened through the actions enabled by the Energy Hub Co-op. This people centered enterprise safeguards the networked system and marketplace platform transactions like matching, trading, buying or providing services (or energy). The hub enables new opportunities for community members to offer and advance their technical expertise in exchange for credits, which can in turn be redeemed to acquire microgrid technologies or other services.
Our system of solutions frames a new energy paradigm that leverages the microgrid. We propose to move:
From data collection/reporting to data-enabled intelligence accessible to the public
From central governance to distributed governance
From inequitable energy distribution to equitable incentive mechanisms
We need to think about energy beyond just as a commodity.
Relying on our current energy infrastructure fundamentally threatens our pursuit of transition to sustainable and resilient energy futures. In the face of this challenge, consumer-driven sustainability narratives keep placing the onus on the end users to adopt sustainable practices and switch to energy-efficient products. However, it becomes increasingly clear that such large-scale transitions require the design of infrastructural interventions that can purposefully align policies and stakeholders towards sustainable energy systems.
METHODS: Communities as the protagonist
This project proposes an integrated way of relating to energy, where communities are the protagonists rather than passive users. We build this through an iterative approach that combines tangible prototyping, computation, and diverse lenses to consider non-technical dimensions of energy:
1. Generative Prototyping
We used generative prototyping through cycles of rapid iteration by building physical objects to communicate ideas, generate questions, and provoke critique. These prototypes are used as tangible props to navigate the problem space, explore opportunity areas, envision new affordances, and surface ethical concerns.
2. Different Lenses
By integrating the lenses of equity, circular economy, behavioral design, and anti-racism into our hands-on exploration, we discovered new opportunity spaces that can activate the microgrid as civic infrastructure.
3. Computation as a Core Element
We used computation as a core ingredient of prototyping to explore the features needed to build collective intelligence as a means to increase the adaptive capacity of the infrastructure and to foster more equitable outcomes for the various users that carry the burden of our current energy paradigm.
We are addressing two large-scale, complex problems: our failing energy infrastructures and climate change. We have an opportunity to address both. We can mitigate climate change by transitioning to a renewable energy system, but to do so we have to start rethinking the systems of delivery. We have to reimagine the electricity grid itself.
"The microgrid concepts allows us to move from a traditional mass-production/mass-consumption model to a distributed system of production and consumption. It will require behavior change at the individual level but also at the community level, and human-centered design can help facilitate these changes as they unfold in the energy sector."
—Charles L. Owen Professor of Design Carlos Teixeira
As we build new energy infrastructures, the mindsets and principles through which we design new interventions matter just as much as the objects of these interventions. And our approaches are available for anyone to evangelize, customize, or adopt.
In fact, as we presented this project to the public, including experts from our local utility company and sustainability advocates, the proposed landscape of solutions enabled them to envision new pathways towards sustainable energy infrastructures.
Thus the proposed solution system is a malleable one, founded on principles of energy governance that can be extended across various contexts. Our offerings can be scaled in unlimited ways.
NEXT STEPS: Preparing for a paradigm shift
While these proposals are meant to enable new actions, they are not sufficient to create change in isolation. To actually create change, students identified two major strategies and corresponding tactics for preparing communities to shift to new energy models and drive the paradigm shift necessary to realize sustainable energy infrastructures:
Normalize active participation in energy transition. Provide tools and technology that grant consumers the power to engage in decision making:
Community-oriented trading, for instance, could transform community members from passive consumers of energy monopolies to active participants in the market for the good of their community.
Energy justice education would equip community members to understand, debate, and participate actively in the creation and evolution of the civic infrastructure, from energy generator installation to shaping economic opportunities.
Encourage informed, cooperative, and responsible consumption. Behavioral nudges and economic incentives can help guide consumers toward more desired and sustainable behaviors:
Adopt new mental models for understanding our relationship to energy so that the inequities embedded in our current energy infrastructure aren’t repeated. Credit systems, energy labels and storage banks, along with incentives, will drive us to think of energy as more than just a commodity and promote collective energy stewardship.
Invest in data-enabled intelligence to increase adaptive capacity and make collaboration easier. Appliance optimization systems learn and adapt, smart meters respond to emerging needs in real time, and ethical algorithms, Ethereum blockchain, and open source databases support expanding energy democracy.
Diversify energy production, transforming grey energy into usable electrical energy and utilizing unused spaces in buildings to generate power.
Ultimately, we certain that design approaches can shape a new energy paradigm that benefits not only the environment but also the people connected to the grid. While not blueprints, these solutions and thinking can move us all forward, informing new approaches as we pursue a healthier relationship with energy.
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