Designing for Digital Mediation of the Volatile Electricity Prices in the European Energy Crisis: An Action Design Research Study

The Green Information Systems research agenda calls for design principles to guide the development of digital artifacts that effectively promote sustainable energy consumption. The effectiveness of these digital artifacts depends on human experiences of the artifact itself and how it mediates experiences of their present situation. A critical situation for many energy consumers is the highly volatile electricity prices with the European energy crisis following the war in Ukraine. Against this backdrop, we conducted an action design research study with a large Danish energy provider on how electricity price overviews mediate the volatile prices in the energy crisis and how this digital mediation can be designed. In two cycles, we engage the organization's consumers and employees to develop a design tool kit using postphenomenology as our theoretical design lens. Postphenomenology is a philosophical approach focusing on the relationship between humans and technology, emphasizing how technology shapes our perceptions of the world. From our action design research cycles with the consumer and provider perceptions, we formalized our learning as design principles for developing digital mediation of volatile electricity prices. These principles systematically address the ontological, epistemological, practical, and ethical dimensions of postphenomenology.