Job description
Are you passionate about the role design aesthetics could play in causing and addressing environmental sustainability challenges? The Designing with Intelligence research cluster at the Industrial Design Department of TU Eindhoven, and the section for Engineering Design and Product Development of DTU jointly invite applications for a 4-year EuroTech PhD project.
Information
The aim of this exciting, creative, critical and multidisciplinary project is to develop design strategies to anticipate and prevent ‘rebound effects’ in the smart home by exploring the potential of aesthetics of uncertainty, instability and emergence. These strategies should evoke the imagination and competence of designers to challenge currently dominant paradigms in home automation and form the basis for developing novel Key Enabling Methodologies.
Background
Home automation (i.e., ‘the smart home’ enabled by Internet of Things) is seen as a promising approach to enable residents to use energy more efficiently and thereby reduce domestic energy demand. However, home automation has so far led to increasing rather than decreasing levels of demand, both in energy and resources. These increased levels of demand are in part caused by the occurrence of ‘rebound effects’. Rebound effects describe ‘systemic responses to measures designed to enhance sustainability outcomes that partially or entirely offset the measure’s intended effects’. In other words, improving efficiency does not deliver the expected sustainability gains due to changes in system behaviour induced by the introduced efficiency measures. At the same time, parallel activities in the ‘smart home’ realm are promoting more resource intensive lifestyles under banners of health, safety and pleasance.
While the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community shaping smart technologies is still coming to terms with its role in causing increased energy and resource consumption it is important to further explore how they can contribute to tackling global crises. Along with a broader system understanding necessary for preventing or mitigating rebound effects, this requires novel perspectives on the role of HCI in shaping quality of life. In this project we aim to do this by combining systemic knowledge on rebound effects (DTU) with an alternative aesthetic perspective on the role of smart technology in everyday life (TU/e).
While in smart system design the focus lies on fostering control, choice and convenience, our research indicates that opportunities to move towards more sustainable lifestyles through design lie in harbouring an alternative aesthetics of uncertainty, instability, and emergence.
Uncertainty is inherent to everyday life and expected to become increasingly so with ongoing climate change and other crises such as mass migration. It is often seen as something negative. However, uncertainty can also lead to sensual experiences of surprise and curiosity and motivate creative exploration or deeper reflections on the reasons behind the uncertainty. We want to take the notion of uncertainty beyond a design material and explore an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ in the design of smart home systems.
Instability is an attribute of dynamical models and systems. With increasing connectivity between different kinds of often poorly compatible systems in the home, instability, break-down and malfunction become regular qualities of smart home systems. Rather than trying to prevent or fix these elements, we propose exploring an aesthetic of ‘caring for instability’.
Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviours emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergent behaviours in intelligent systems, such as rebound effects, are preferably prevented. However, a system might also have desirable emergent behaviours. Anticipation is a condition of aesthetic form, according to Dewey. ‘Anticipating emergence’ is then a responsible strategy for the future development of smart home systems.
Approach
The project will take a Constructive Design Research approach, by which knowledge is generated through the process of designing. This process contains a series of iterations, i.e., aesthetic inquiries that build on each other. By exploratively developing the alternative aesthetic qualities into design exemplars for the home context, while iteratively evaluating these outcomes against broader, longer term potential rebound effects and feasibility on a system level, this project aims to develop approaches that offer handles to interaction designers in reinventing their practices for a less resource intensive future that is resilient to the occurrence of rebound effects.
The process is envisioned to comprise four main iterations. Involving experimentation with different forms of designing and aesthetics, developing and deploying working prototypes in small and medium scale settings, systemic assessments of potential prevention of rebound effects of the concepts, and making and testing educational materials for design students. In the first year, the research plan will be refined together with the PhD candidate.
During this process, the PhD candidate will spend at least 6 months at DTU. The candidate is expected to publish in relevant scientific conferences and journals within the field of human-computer interaction, such as the CHI and DIS conferences, Ubicomp and the ToCHI journal. At the end of the 4-year project, the candidate is expected to defend their PhD Thesis.
Prospective starting date: September 2026 (in consultation).
The team
The PhD will be supervised by Dr. Lenneke Kuijer and Professor Dr. Stephan Wensveen in the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and Professor Dr. Daniela Pigosso in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
Lenneke Kuijer is an expert in the areas of domestic energy demand, home automation and social practice theories. Stephan Wensveen co-developed notions around aesthetics of interaction and is currently researching aesthetic perspectives on designing intelligent systems. Daniella Pigosso brings in expertise on rebound effects, circular economy and product-service systems (PSS) and a strong link with industry.