Normed Sustainability : A socio-technological journey in hygiene practices

Sammanfattning: This report will guide you through a journey of a socio-technological research where questions evolved from the intertwining of technology and social structures will be answered. During spring 2019, this research project has taken part as a pilot study of a research project called Gendered sustainability: Norm-Critical explorations of energy practices for everyday transitions. The research project has the purpose to show the understanding of climate, energy and equality issues as interlinked, and to explore power structures embedded in present relations between practices, products and environments. Both the UN’s global sustainability goal, and Swedish national goal regarding energy politics and equality, explicitly mention a need to raise social and ecological perspectives as integrated. The chosen focus for this pilot study is a practice that is a human right but has become a luxury – this study will focus on practices related to hygiene. The purpose of this study is to create a new narrative of practices related to hygiene, thus encouraging a more sustainable manner to perform these practices. To create a new narrative, a design process has been performed to generate discursive design artefacts which tells the new story. These artefacts are a part of the research method and aims to explore, not explain a problem definition or become of commercial interest. By understanding that present narratives need to be questioned, not only from a material perspective, but also from a conventional and temporal perspective – a change could be possible with design. To explore and visualise norms, behaviours and social structures behind the practice, the research and design process is based on theories of practice as a unit of design and norm-critical design. These theories highlight the importance of empirical user insights, which is explored with human centred design methods, interviews, and user analysis. Based on the insights gained a generative design process took place to create the discursive design objects. The objects aim to be means of communication and to trig discussions of how the new narrative takes place. The new narrative consists of three artefacts contributing to the story telling; the Mistwall challenges the cleanliness norm by providing a concept without flowing water; the Skinbrush that challenges the norm of gendered products by putting the human body as genderless in focus; and the Meter that takes advantage of norms related to the high beliefs in science and technology to question how cleanliness is estimated. Together they tell a new, more sustainable, narrative of performing hygiene practices