The Making of an Energy Renovation: Knowing & Acting on Energy-Saving Features through Design Processes

Energy renovations are crucial means to reduce energy consumption from the existing building stock. However, research does not widely attend to the practical details of designing for energy savings. Much research focuses on the technical and economic aspects of energy renovations. However, energy performance as a design problem remains overlooked or taken for granted in most of the existing literature. This study draws on the sociology of asssociations and investigates how designers make energy-saving design features knowable and actionable through their everyday design practices. The analysis shows how energy-saving features emerge from negotiations of interests and interactions between designers and material objects. The study highlights processes of persuasion, learning and stabilisation/destabilisation in the making of energy renovations. Based on the findings, this study suggests that if research does not draw attention to the everyday challenges and conflicts happening during the design of energy renovations, then ambitions concerning minimum energy consumption in buildings are likely to fall short.