Energy Transition (ET) is crucial for sustainable development, impacting inclusive prosperity and social justice. Knowledge development, innovative solutions, and awareness actions become crucial as energy systems transform. ET necessitates behavioural and cultural changes involving individuals in responsible decision making. The active engagement of all societal actors, including people and communities is essential. The article is authored by a university research team specializing in Design for Sustainability, Service Design, and Design for Experience, and it addresses two central research questions: (i) how can individuals and communities contribute to ET? and (ii) how can design theories, methods, and expertise contribute to generating knowledge and solutions for ET? The research employs a multidisciplinary literature review and case study analysis. It is structured into two main sections. The first section examines ET, drawing upon European Union (EU) official documents and academic literature to outline its values, objectives, actors, initiatives, and challenges, focusing on the role of citizens and communities. The second section explores the design’s contributions, summarizing relevant philosophies and solutions aligned with ET goals, challenges, and bottlenecks. Conceptual maps were created to address the knowledge gap on ET objectives and guidelines, providing design-oriented reference knowledge and principles. The purpose of the research is to define a conceptual framework made up of maps to guide researchers, designers, and design educators in understanding the complexity of ET and to inspire their intervention proposals.

The rise of the silver economy has drawn a growing interest in understanding the needs and behaviours of older adults, both by academics as well as the business and public sectors. Services promoting wellbeing can have several benefits both on individual and national levels, and social connectedness, as one aspect of wellbeing, has been found to positively impact healthy ageing and quality of life among older adults. The aim of this study was to conduct a first exam of the potentials of a remote cultural event to facilitate social connectedness and well-being in a community of older adults through culture and the arts. This study utilised a qualitative exploratory approach in the form of a co-designed case study set in a Finnish care home. An opera streaming event was planned and organised in co-operation with multiple stakeholders including the residents. The results highlight the role of social interaction as part of a remote cultural experience, prior, during, and post-experience. Partaking in the event resulted in enhanced social connectedness, more positive views on technology and remote experiences, and overall satisfaction for joining. The social aspect, rituals, and etiquette are also present also in watching opera remotely, and emphasising these aspects in designing such services could leverage the potential that digital cultural experiences hold.

There are currently several systems for home automation and energy management available on the market. These systems are intended to reduce the use of energy, while ensuring optimal and customizable comfort conditions. The advances in technology (Internet of Things, sensors, cloud computing, data processing and thermal modelling) and in the design of interfaces should facilitate the adoption of convenient behaviours by final users, thereby producing more sustainable use of energy at home. Conversely, the effectiveness and efficiency of smart home systems for thermo-regulation is a complex activity, requiring the collaboration of multiple stakeholders and experts. In this paper, the authors report a case study about the design of a system for thermal regulation at home developed in a multidisciplinary research team for research and industrial purposes. The paper reports results including: a discussion on a number of issues involved in the design of smart home solutions for sustainability and on the importance of developing an integrated approach to their design; the needs analysis of users and of their functional requirements based on investigation with residents and profiling; final remarks about the role of User Experience Design methods and tools in the development of smart home solutions, understood as socio-technical systems.

The paper investigates some critical issues connected to the digitalization of products and systems for the domestic environments involving the collection of personal data. The research focuses on the most innovative solutions, such as those based on AI algorithms for speech recognition, IoTs, wearable devices, cloud computing, and the use of smart phones and devices. These solutions require and imply the collection of personal data and their local or remote processing. The paper provides a design-oriented discussion on the features of smart products with respect to the consequences of design choices on complex dimensions of experience such as sense of self, privacy, and personal identity. The paper aims to set out the terms of a discussion about the most critical factors of services and systems involving personal data, and to create references on the responsibilities of designers acting in multi-disciplinary project teams. The research is based on ethnography at home and on a critical discussion about case studies. The results highlight the importance of considering privacy and control issues in the design of smart solutions and provide some pointers to be used in the development of smart solutions for home.

In the lifecycle of material products, from the very initial design phase of concept generation to the final disposal, information and communication have always played a prominent part that, in the digital era, is growing and is expected to grow further, also enabling the blooming of grass root and bottom-up changes in the galaxy of design-production-retail systems. Since the beginning of the human history, commerce has been playing a major role in shaping social organization systems. Retail services are not just a way to obtain goods: they provide opportunities for social relationship and cultural growth, and can be considered as a field for social innovation. Our research is aimed to investigate the systemic changes that are occurring in the realm of information and communication services in retail of material products, and their consequences on design, production and distribution processes. The research is supported by TIM-Telecom Italia, it is a wide-ranging study of social, professional and industrial phenomena enabled by digital technologies, and it involves both physical (i.e. traditional distribution in physical retail spaces) and on line services. Our goal is to outline strategic approaches to the design of innovative service/systems and, presently, we mainly focus on two key issue: - understanding and modelling the tangle of factors that determine the user experience in traditional and digital shopping processes; - develop design methodologies supporting the creation of new meaningful services so to support the customers in the understanding of value and in the search of quality in shopping processes. The paper investigates new social behaviors related to shopping, such as show-rooming and web-rooming, and we demonstrate that the pervasive use of mobile devices produces new social phenomena in retail processes and enables new opportunities to create value in retail services. From the investigation of on-line and off-line markets, it emerges the importance of social dynamics and human interactions belonging to physical world: relational dynamics and knowledge acquisition processes play a very important role in the elicitation of senses and emotions, in cultural upgrading, value understanding, quality awareness, trust building. Thereafter, a driving research questions is: how can we orient the design of innovative services so to improve the relationship between customers and retailers? The analysis of these new trends and the presentations of some design experiences bring us to the definition of some strategic directions guiding the generation of new paradigms of services in the retail field.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2016.3329