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This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens' active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.

Purpose– "User" is the lingua franca term used across IT design, often critiqued for giving a reductionist portrayal of the human relationship with technologies. The purpose of this paper is to argue that equating "user" with flesh and blood "people out there" is naïve. Not only that, it closes important options in conducting human-centered design.Design/methodology/approach– The authors conceptually elaborate a relational understanding of the user and integrate research findings on user representations found at the intersection of human-centered design and social studies of technology.Findings– The user is best understood as a relational term that bridges between people out there and renditions of them relevant for design. A distinction between "user representations" and "engaged use" is a key distinction to clarify this further. Research to date demonstrates that R & D organizations have a wide range of user representations and positioning human-centered design to these would advance its likely yield.Research limitations/implications– The strategic positioning of user studies and other human-centered design within R & D organizations is a growing research area that merits further research.Practical implications– Descriptions of users would benefit from being more strategic in order to become viable amidst other design concerns. This can be aided by, for instance, visualizing the "users" that different fractions in the company rely on and compare these to the users indicated by human-centered design.Originality/value– The paper makes an original reconceptualization of the user and integrates literature on user representations to open new options for conducting human-centered design.

The types of work going into participatory and community forms of design is an emerging research area that complements participatory design's earlier emphasis on the ideals and principles of democratic design. This article documents a year-long process wherein a hosted citizen-designer community was initiated to contribute to the design of a large public space its services: Helsinki Central Library Oodi. We examine the types of work designers in the host organization engaged in to accomplish the set-up and initiation of the hosted citizen-designer community. In so doing we examine how views of design democracy and practical considerations permeate each other in the realization of the hosted community. ; Peer reviewed

Acknowledgments -- About the editors -- About the contributors -- Introduction to the new production of users / Sampsa Hyysalo, Torben Elgaard Jensen and Nelly Oudshoorn -- Rethinking and extending theoretical approaches to the production of users in innovation -- Protecting the right to innovate : our innovation "wetlands" / Andrew W. Torrance and Eric von Hippel -- User representation : a journey towards conceptual maturation / Sampsa Hyysalo and Mikael Johnson -- How user assemblage matters : constructing learning-by-using in the case of wind turbine technology in Denmark 1973-1990 / Kristian H. Nielsen -- User-producer engagements between democratized technology and industrial strategizing -- Making work visible / Lucy Suchman -- Making sense of user involvement : hopes, fears and pragmatics / Torben Elgaard Jensen and Morten Krogh Petersen -- Generification as a strategy : how software producers configure products, manage user communities and segment markets / Neil Pollock, Robin Williams and Luciana D?Adderio -- Innovation practices and user communities -- Innovation in civil society : the socio-material dynamics of a community innovation / Stefan Verhaegh, Ellen van Oost, and Nelly Oudshoorn -- User communities as multi-functional spaces : innovation, collective voice, demand articulation, peer informing and professional identity (and more) / Hajar Mozaffar -- Unwanted innovation and non-users -- "We walk straight past the screens" : the power of non-users of a hospital information system / Line Melby and Pieter Toussaint -- Users, non-users and "resistance" to pharmaceuticals / Kate Weiner and Catherine Will -- Diy research in the psychonaut subculture : a case of unwanted user innovation / Johan Soderberg -- Afterword / Trevor Pinch -- Index