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The use of practices as a unit of analysis has been suggested in order to scale up efforts within sustainable HCI and to shift the focus from changing individual behaviours to supporting transitions at a societal level. In this paper, we take a practice approach to the case of sustainable transportation, and more specifically to carfree transportation. Car use is intertwined in many practices and managing life without a car is difficult, particularly for people in contexts where owning at least one car per family is the norm. We studied three families in Stockholm who replaced their cars with different combinations of light electric vehicles during one year. From the families' experiences, we identified a number of opportunities for designers of interactive technologies to support environmental pioneers in the particular case of car-free living, as well as to support transitions towards sustainable practices in general.

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This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Model Based User Interface Development offers the possibility to design User Interfaces without being concerned about the underlying implementation. This is achieved by devising models at a high level of abstraction, thus creating the potential for involving users or domain experts to achieve a user-centered design process. Obtaining a running interactive application from such models usually requires several model transformations. One of the current problems is that while a user interface is generated after these transformations, other parts of the interactive system such as the application logic need to pre-exist or they must be written manually before the interface can be tested in a realistic scenario. This leaves the domain experts dependent on programmers and increases the time between iterations. In this paper we work with Query Annotations, which were previously used only for modeling at low levels and for generating fully functional interfaces, and we aim to generalize them for the high-level modeling approach called Discourse Modeling. The direct expected benefit of this generalization is the possibility to generate complete, readily testable interactive prototypes, rather than just their user interfaces. In addition, Query Annotations can serve as the mapping between the various levels of abstraction and bring to the domain experts a better understanding of the transformation process, as well as the possibility to modify the interfaces and models directly.