Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power, agency and politics; governing transitions; civil society, culture and social movements; businesses and industries; transitions in practice and everyday life; geography of transitions; ethical aspects; and methodologies. The review shows that the scope of sustainability transitions research has broadened and connections to established disciplines have grown stronger. At the same time, we see that the grand challenges related to sustainability remain unsolved, calling for continued efforts and an acceleration of ongoing transitions. Transition studies can play a key role in this regard by creating new perspectives, approaches and understanding and helping to move society in the direction of sustainability.
This paper explores the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technologies. We focus on intermediaries that facilitate user innovation, and the linking of user innovation into supply side activities. We review findings on intermediaries in some of our studies and other available literature to build a framework to explore of how intermediaries work in making innovation happen. We make sense of these processes by taking a long-term view of the dynamics of technology and market development using the social learning in technological innovation (SLTI) framework. Our primary concern is with innovation intermediaries and their core roles of configuring, facilitating and brokering technologies, uses and relationships in uncertain and emerging markets. We show the range of positions and influence they have along the supply-use axis in a number of different innovation contexts, and how they are able to bridge the user-developer innovation domains. Equipped with these insights, we explore in more depth how intermediaries affect the shape of new information and communication technologies and the importance of identifying and nurturing the user-side intermediaries that are crucial to innovation success.
In this article we outline a temporally extended co-design process of media technologies developed in collaboration with elderly people. In the course of doing this, we identify a set of design strategies that helped to sustain the collaboration. Based on our experiences, we recognise the need for developing design strategies for extended and evolutionary design collaborations with ordinary communities that have special needs, and do not possess significant resourcing, design experience or skills in the technology in question. Such communities of practice pose challenges to shorter term project-centred forms of co-design and also require updates to the existing extended design approaches, which rest on relatively high user skill and resourcing. The 'ageing together' design strategies outlined in this article hence take necessary steps in adjusting co-designers' repertoires of engagement in this type of everyday context.
Distributed manufacturing is rapidly proliferating to citizen level via the use of digital fabrication equipment, especially in dedicated "makerspaces". The sustainability benefits of citizens' personal fabrication are commonly endorsed. However, to assess how these maker practitioners actually deal with environmental issues, these practitioners and their practices need to be studied. Moreover research on the environmental issues in personal fabrication is nascent despite the common perception that the digital technologies can become disruptive. The present paper is the first to report on how practitioners assess the environmental sustainability of future practices in this rapidly changing field. It does so through an envisioning workshop with leading-edge makers. The findings show that these makers are well able to envision the future of their field. Roughly 25% of the issues covered had clear environmental implications. Within these, issues of energy use, recycling, reusing and reducing materials were covered widely by environmentallyoriented participants. In contrast, issues related to emerging technologies, materials and practices were covered by other participants, but their environmental implications remained unaddressed. The authors concluded there is a gap between different maker subcultures in their sustainability orientations and competences. Further research on the environmental aspects of real-life maker practices and personal fabrication technologies now could help avert negative impacts later, as the maker phenomenon spreads. This knowledge should also be directed to developing targeted environmental guidelines and solutions for personal fabrication users, which are currently lacking. Potential also lies in seeking to enhance dialogue between pro-environmental and new-technology-oriented practitioners through shared spaces, workshops and conferences.
This paper focuses on an underemphasized issue in research on user innovation, namely users' adaptations and micro‐innovations and their impact on industry development in user‐innovation‐intensive industries. It complements previous analyses of rodeo and freestyle‐kayaking that explore the role of user innovators in industry development, by focusing on different aspects of micro‐innovation: (1) changes in the composition of user base and preferred equipment (2) evolution of everyday practice (3) changes in the settings of these practices and (4) the range of modes of user involvement. Through micro‐innovation, users, on the whole, are likely to have more impact on industry development than predicted, and yet the position of lead‐users and user–manufacturers may be less powerful relative to outside manufacturers.
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