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In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components -people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind -that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.

For sustainable practices to emerge, they have to be tried out. In the design intervention A Car-free Year, we studied the particularities of three families' changed practices. With a collaborative mind-set, the practices' constituting elements were analysed, and their intertwined links followed, forming possible design concepts. When designing these seeds for changed practices, we have found, through the knowledge gained from the participants' different perspectives, possibilities to design initiatives that could enable more people to live car-free. We believe that designing enabling ecosystems, where all types of elements encourage sustainable practices, can be an important role of sustainable design. Furthermore, design research can challenge existing societal norms, as clearly revealed in this project, and consequently inspire more people to make sustainable lifestyle choices.

Despite many contributions to Sustainable HCI stressing the importance of "moving beyond the individual", a majority of HCI work is still targeted mainly at consumers or resource users. However, many stakeholders influence resource use and including such stakeholders in design work can open up new design opportunities for supporting sustainable practices. In this paper, we present results from a longitudinal study of practices related to energy improvement work in housing cooperatives. During the study, we discovered new opportunities for interactive technologies to support this work when we involved various stakeholders other than housing cooperatives. In addition, we discuss more general implications for design aiming to support diverse stakeholder engagement in practices related to resource use: which stakeholders and practices to include, temporal aspects of engagement, and opportunities for supporting shared responsibility for resource use.

Transitions toward more sustainable mobility are necessary and involve changes in complex constellations of mobility-related practices. To understand opportunities for moving in this direction, there is a need to explore both the consumption side of sustainable mobility practices and the perspective of stakeholders that provide products, services, infrastructures, and policies required for such practices. This article contributes to a discussion of critical aspects of sustainable mobility practices in relation to the responsibilities and concerns of stakeholders with power to influence these practices. We present four sets of design concepts for supporting car-free living which were formulated and co-created based on a practice-oriented analysis of a one-year study of three families in Stockholm, Sweden that replaced their cars with light electric vehicles. The design concepts bring forward elements of sustainable mobility with a focus on: trying out new mobility practices, cycling infrastructure, childfriendly public transport, and transporting stuff. Furthermore, we discussed the concepts with public and private sector stakeholders and examined their interests in particular practices. Also considered are how the responsibilities of different stakeholders may clash. Finally, we suggest that practice-oriented design concepts can support discussions and increased knowledge about responsibilities and potential conflicts related to sustainable practices, as well as provide means for supporting learning about sustainable practices among decision makers.

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.

Abstract-We present the design and evaluation of the heat recovery system for KTH's Lindgren, Stockholm's fastest supercomputer, a Cray XE6. Lindgren came into service in 2010 and has since been primarily used for complex numeric simulations of fluid mechanics and computational chemistry and biology. The heat exchange system collects the wasted heat from Lindgren's 36,384 CPU cores and transfers it via the standard district heating and cooling system to a neighboring building which houses the Chemistry laboratories. We analyze the impact of Lindgren's heat recycle system as a function of outside temperature and we estimate the system's carbon emission savings. Since the original installation of Lindgren in 2010, it has become common practice to use water cooling systems for supercomputers, as water is a better heat transfer medium than air. We discuss the relevant design lessons from Lindgren as they relate to practical and sustainable waste heat recovery designs for today's platforms. Finally, we estimate that the recovered heat from Lindgren reduced the carbon emissions by nearly 50 tons over the 2012-13 winter, the sample period of our analysis.Index Terms-Supercomputer, data center, waste heat recovery, heat exchanger, waste energy reuse, urban district heating and cooling, high-performance computing.

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.