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In light of the continuing momentum behind the Circular Economy and Bio-economy agendas, organic electronics hold much promise in regards to future resource management. The materials used to create organic electronics could/can meet electrical product design requirements, replace the use of toxic materials, draw upon sustainable resources, have the potential to offer regenerative properties back to the earth upon disposal and at the same time support the strive towards a low carbon future. The report documents an exploratory research project on the introduction of organic electronics into the electronic and electrical equipment, funded by the Lancaster University Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account Funds. The research aims are highlighting ‘violet biotechnology’ (ethical, philosophical and legal), economic, environmental and societal themes that are seen as accompanying a shift from the existing electronics industry sector that utilises materials composed predominantly of inorganic materials. These topics might be perceived as benefits of the technology, barriers to its development, and implications for the sector and related areas, such as electronic waste. The grant supported a seven-month part-time project that examined the areas outlined, established links with industry partners, and undertook a literature analysis on the topic. The research objectives were intended to inform a future research-funding bid for a longer-term collaborative and interdisciplinary research project involving a variety of academic and industrial partners.

In the energy field, picking the ‘low hanging fruit’ means taking measures that are simple to implement and that generate quick returns in terms of carbon and energy demand reduction. In taking this term seriously and in taking it apart this chapter shows how the language of low hanging fruit situates and frames both the problem and the politics of energy demand reduction. As described, the phrase reproduces and reinforces a distinctly technocratic approach that bypasses fundamental questions about what energy is used for in society, and how this changes over time. Other metaphors – including references to fungi – could be developed in support of more subtle and more integrated accounts of how energy policies, technologies and patterns of demand affect each other.

Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011. It constitutes a radical shift for UK planning and a striking example of the participatory and localist turns in governance, allowing ‘laypeople’ to write their own statutory planning policies. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community which prioritises local experiential knowledge and care for place. However, drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from Science and Technology Studies and four years of ethnographic fieldwork at two sites in the North West of England, my research suggests a more complex picture. I show how the practices of Neighbourhood Planning reproduce the category of the expert and the expert-agency coupling by producing a new subset of lay-experts. However, they occupy a precarious position, being reliant on established expertise to stabilise their expert identity, but also subject to displacement by that expertise. They must also perform other identities alongside that of the expert to establish and maintain their legitimacy, and powerful tensions arise between these identities. Successfully enacting this composite of identities enables them to draw on complex, hybrid forms of representative, participatory, and epistemological authority. This constrains their ability to represent the neighbourhood as experienced and forces them to reframe the issues that they want to address, but also enables them to make real differences to the ways in which the neighbourhood will change. Framing the production and evaluation of evidence in terms of ‘matters of concern’ (Latour) and ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa), situated in a narrative context, would enable the diversity of things that matter to these groups to be addressed more directly, and allow better critical consideration of both those knowledge claims labelled as ‘objective’ and those labelled as ‘subjectiv

There is renewed and increasing interest in understanding the part that infrastructures play in societal transformations, especially in response to the various challenges of climate change. Studies that focus on these issues tend to examine infrastructures in isolation from each other, and tend to work with evolutionary accounts of incremental change punctuated by short periods of radical innovation. This paper questions both these abstractions. Using four empirical cases, it directs attention to intersections between infrastructures at specific times and places, highlighting the dynamic qualities of infrastructures-in-use, and conceptualising societal transformations as outcomes of these intersections. Four forms of intersection are elaborated – co-constitution, adaptation and threading through, historical layering, and coexisting configurations. Instances of each are used to illustrate some of complex and often ambiguous processes through which infrastructures interact. The paper ends by outlining implications for future research and for interventions by policy-makers and others seeking to influence the ways in which infrastructures intersect.

Building standards, regulations and labelling schemes are instruments for reducing energy demand and carbon emissions, linking policy ambitions to market-based responses. In practice, their effects are complicated. In this paper we show how ‘market standards’ in the office sector are fostering escalating energy demand and favouring building designs increasingly disconnected from changing user needs. In ‘black boxing’ ideas about needs, standards powerfully and dangerously stabilize, and often escalate, concepts of ‘normal’ provision. Far from being neutral, standards are operating amid competing interests and ambitions in the market place. Processes of black-boxing, locking-in, ratcheting, reification, circulation and disconnection (the ‘dark sides’ of standards in action) are investigated to explore how they might be avoided. The paper provides insight into the role that market standards play in energy demand in the non-domestic (office) sector, through an examination of ten case studies of speculative office developments in London.

The timing of energy demand is increasingly important given the pressure to decarbonise energy systems, accommodate more intermittent forms of renewable energy supply and reduce peak load. In the transport sector, rush hours and periods of congestion present problems of their own also related to the synchronisation and the sequencing of social practices. This document brings together DEMAND research on the social-temporal ordering of what people do and considers the implications of this work for ‘demand management’ and for efforts to develop more flexible energy systems

This paper develops existing work on building design through a focus on one important yet understudied form of regulation: market standards. Market standards are agreed upon definitions of ‘necessary’ provision in buildings and are fundamental in ‘formatting’ markets and determining the value of a building in the market. The paper presents a case study of the design of ten commercial offices in London, UK, the effects of market standards on the designs and on the potential for the development of lower energy buildings. Theoretically, the paper integrates literatures on standards, institutions and markets to argue that market standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that requires closer scrutiny. In particular, we show that market standards: are an important form of normative and cultural regulation in the field of commercial office design; format and act as calculative devices in property markets; and result in forms of knowledge diminution that break the relationship between building design and occupiers’ practices. Together, these effects result in particular designs being legitimised and valued, and lower energy designs being delegitimised, devalued and pushed to the periphery of the attention of commercial office designers.

This paper engages with theoretical insights on understanding everyday travel (from the mobility turn and theories of social practice) in an analysis of everyday mobility using data from ethnographic research. The analysis of mobile performances draws attention to how travellers incorporate valued dispersed practices into mobility. We argue that incorporating such contingent practices into travel generates affective satisfactions consistently sought across transport mode changes through the life-course. These findings complement existing abstract analyses of modal choice and are explored to draw out the implications for the attractiveness of different modes and the potential for broader transitions to lower carbon mobility.

Meeting the UK’s 80% carbon reduction targets (HM Government, 2008) depends on reducing energy demand, of that there is no doubt. There is much less clarity about the types of changes this entails, or how these might come about. This cross-cutting DEMAND research insight reviews alternative methods of conceptualising and steering changes in energy demand. Each of the five approaches we describe has practical consequences – favouring, or cautioning against specific types of policy intervention. Before outlining these strategies we begin with a few words on the fundamental meaning of ‘energy demand’, that is, on what it is that is or ought to be changing.

Attendees at the Office (Work) Future(s) workshop will have different interests but the ideas and materials included in this position paper are hopefully broad and diverse enough to provoke thoughts and responses from all. The central question to be addressed is how might we think about Office (Work) Future(s)? Related questions are: • Where is the future office and whose office is it? • What will it look like and how will it be serviced? • Where and when will future office work take place? • What is the role of technology in these office/work futures? • What are the energy demand implications of these potential futures and how might they be steered? This document is a first attempt at corralling and exploring some of these issues, and identifying questions that arise. It is an attempt to capture different ‘visions’ of the potential futures in this area that are identifiable at this moment in time. It is by no means comprehensive and part of the purpose of the workshop is to capture other work and particularly academic perspectives on this material – suggestions for material to be followed up on is particularly appreciated. In the different sessions of the workshop discussion will be prompted by presentations given by a number of people in response to this document. It is hoped that the responses to the paper and the discussions at the workshop will help to shape ongoing work on energy demand and the future of office work, and the creation of a research programme for a future funded project

In this paper we examine the influence of what we call market standards on design. We do this using the case of the design of commercial offices and the effects of standards on moves towards less energy demanding designs. Theoretically the paper builds on concepts drawn from a range of literatures examining standards, including science and technology studies and the sociology of standards. We argue that standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. We show that in the case of commercial offices this affect the likelihood of the incorporation of low energy technologies. Our analysis reveals: the importance of taking greater account of normative and cultural forms of market standards and their role in design; the value of explaining how standards break the relationship between design and social practice, in our case this meaning that low energy technologies that might adequately cater for office work much of the time are considered inappropriate due to a lack of understanding of office work practices; how standards interlock to legitimate incumbent (higher energy) technologies, and in turn de-legitimise (lower energy) alternatives, through the way they define what is ‘needed’; the value of tactics within energy and sustainability policies designed to govern non-regulatory standards and their effects. The paper thus makes an important contribution to understanding the ‘work’ of standards, and more broadly the production of energy demand in offices.

The automobile commute makes an important contribution to carbon emissions but has proven stubbornly resistant to modal shift policy initiatives. In this paper we use theories of social practice to develop insights into why this stubbornness might exist, and what might help accelerate transitions to bus- and cycle-commuting. By analysing qualitative data about everyday mobility in two UK cities, we examine how the availability of the constituent elements of bus- and cycle-commuting practices is crucial for modal shift to occur, but they are often absent. We also draw attention to time-space contingencies that render recruitment to low-carbon commuting practices more or less likely, including how commuting is sequenced with other social practices and how the sites of these practices interact with the affordances, and spatial infrastructure, of bus- and cycle-commuting. These insights lead us to argue that choice and land use planning focussed policy initiatives designed to invoke modal shift need to coexist in integrated policy configurations with initiatives designed to reshape both mobility and non-mobility practices. This means addressing the structural barriers caused by the lack of availability of the elements that constitute bus- and cycle-commuting, and intervening in the timing and spatiality of a range of social practices so as to reduce the tendency for commutes to have spatial and temporal characteristics that militate against the use of bus and cycle modes.

In this paper we examine the influence of what we call market standards on design. We do this using the case of the design of commercial offices and the effects of standards on moves towards less energy demanding designs. Theoretically the paper builds on concepts drawn from a range of literatures examining standards, including science and technology studies and the sociology of standards. We argue that standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. We show that in the case of commercial offices this affect the likelihood of the incorporation of low energy technologies. Our analysis reveals: the importance of taking greater account of normative and cultural forms of market standards and their role in design; the value of explaining how standards break the relationship between design and social practice, in our case this meaning that low energy technologies that might adequately cater for office work much of the time are considered inappropriate due to a lack of understanding of office work practices; how standards interlock to legitimate incumbent (higher energy) technologies, and in turn de-legitimise (lower energy) alternatives, through the way they define what is ‘needed’; the value of tactics within energy and sustainability policies designed to govern non-regulatory standards and their effects. The paper thus makes an important contribution to understanding the ‘work’ of standards, and more broadly the production of energy demand in offices.