This paper aims to develop a framework for generating synthetic data for the Swedish built environment to improve energy predictions and peak load management in heating systems. Heating and cooling are central aspects of reducing energy use in the residential sector. However, predicting the energy performance of buildings is currently a difficult task, partly due to energy use data from end-users being outdated and sometimes missing. In the end, we will contribute to future energy systems in a broader sense by developing a socio-technical and ethical methodological framework for working with synthetic energy data. We will map available data together with stakeholders' needs. Data will be collected and prepared as training data to develop and evaluate a model for synthetic data. The approach is interdisciplinary which will ensure the integration of socio-technical, ethical and gendered aspects of energy use and synthetic data.

This paper presents a case study conducted in the neighborhood Vallastaden in Linköping, Sweden, where developers built low energy cooperative housing intended to meet the passive house standards. Previous research highlights the need for integrated approaches to understand residents’ thermal comfort and energy use, as some low energy house concepts fail to meet energy performance requirements. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the understanding of cooperative housing and residents’ experiences of thermal comfort in newly built homes in Sweden. Through a detailed case study that included activity diaries, visualizations based on diary data and workshops with residents, we explored residents’ actions to achieve thermal comfort. With concepts from time-geography, we discuss insights regarding residents’ experiences and strategies. Results show that cooperative housing in Vallastaden, while being comfortably warm during winter, suffers from poor design and engineering to protect residents from overheating during hot summer days. Residents choreographed their space-time activities to adjust for the constraints of the designs by elaborate schedules for airing, remodeling their homes or sometimes staying away from the home. Exploring this everyday experience together with visualizations of thermal comfort brings forward new insight into the thermal comfort concerns of residents in cooperative housing.

Borders are essential in the current planning of cities since new forms of social relations are needed to support more sustainable ways of life. In this article, we present a case study of a sustainability-profiled new neighbourhood, Vallastaden in Sweden. We focus on how sustainability is enacted in different socio-material versions, which often include defusing borders between private and shared spaces. Shared space in Vallastaden includes spaces to facilitate meetings, such as felleshus (built as semi-communal, ground-level buildings, semi-indoor spaces, and greenhouses), winter gardens (built as rooftop, semi-private, semi-indoor, and social spaces), and the shared brook-park Broparken and farm-park Paradiset with rental allotments and communal gardens. Analysing how bordering practices create inclusion and exclusion, we study their consequences for the everyday lives of humans and non-humans in Vallastaden. We conceptualise these dynamics as fluid and fire space in order to make the ontological politics of bordering visible. Our study shows that the borders in the planned shared spaces are dynamic and create both fluid and fire space, depending on their socio-material relations. The research shows that planners need to take these heterogeneous socio-material relations into account when creating borders because, otherwise, they risk creating unfair exclusions.

Building information modelling (BIM) is a digital tool that offers the possibility to collect and share a multitude of data about a building and increase collaboration across professional borders. However, the uptake of BIM in the construction industry has been relatively slow, and previous research has shown how BIM creates tensions in the workplace. In this article, we explore the impact of BIM on socio-technical knowledge practices, to understand how these are enabled or restricted by the use of BIM. Through a qualitative case study in Sweden, this article analyses BIM through a knowledge infrastructure framework to explain the relatively slow uptake of BIM in a new light. The results show that BIM lacks embeddedness in governmental and corporate practices and regulations and that it sometimes leads to the marginalization of some professions through changed organizations and the slow process of changing complex knowledge infrastructures. This suggests that a critical discussion of the role of BIM in relation to professional flexibility, construction project process organization and power over technological development is vital for the future development of the construction sector.

Purpose: The information technology (IT) sector has been seen as central to society's transformation to a more just and sustainable society, which underlines teachers’ responsibility to foster engineers who can contribute specifically to such ends. This study aims to report an effort to significantly update an existing engineering programme in IT with this ambition and to analyse the effects and challenges associated with the transformation.

Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on a combination of action-oriented research based on implementing key changes to the curriculum; empirical investigations including surveys and interviews with students and teachers, and analysis of these; and a science and technology studies-inspired analysis.

Findings: Respondents were generally positive towards adding topics relating to sustainability. However, in the unmaking of traditional engineering subjects, changes created a conflict between core versus soft subjects in which the core subjects tended to gain the upper hand. This conflict can be turned into productive discussions by focusing on what kinds of engineers the authors’ educate and how students can be introduced to societal problems as an integrated part of their education.

Practical implications: This study can be helpful for educators in the engineering domain to support them in their efforts to transition from a (narrow) focus on traditional disciplines to one where the bettering of society is at the core.

Originality/value: This study provides a novel approach to the transformation of engineering education through a theoretical analysis seldom used in studies of higher education on a novel case study.

This article explores how sustainability is made present and visible in the life of residents in a new neighbourhood. Glass is enacted by design professionals and a Swedish municipality to create spaces for residents that fulfil sustainability objectives and put daily life on display. However, some practises developed by residents resist the intended uses of these spaces. Through a detailed case study of the proclaimed new role model neighbourhood of Vallastaden in Linkoping, Sweden, we critically investigate the ontological politics of the residents everyday life, including their social life with neighbours, low-energy living, interactions with local small businesses, recycling habits and mobility habits. By attending to glass, we show how humans, non-humans, materials and technologies become part of everyday practises and help uncover the ontological politics of mundane life.

The new technologies under the name of Building Information Modelling (BIM) can be used to facilitate collaborations and have been predicted to be central in the digital revolution of the construction industry. However, BIM has been available for almost a decade, yet the industry still relies heavily on paper documents and the profession specific software BIM was supposed to replace. The resistance towards BIM has foremost been explained by organizational and collaboration problems but in this paper I will argue that BIM more importantly fails in changing how knowledge is produced, handled and negotiated. The paper builds on a case study of a consultancy company in Sweden and analyse professional practices inspired by concepts from the knowledge infrastructure framework (Edwards et al., 2013; Bowker, 2016). In this paper I explore how BIM sometimes successfully breaches established methods and challenges existing knowledge hierarchies while at other times fails to become embedded in everyday practices. BIM comes with embedded values and shift power relations due to different levels of IT knowledge. Feelings of pride in, and care for, craftmanship is shown to be crucial for when digital technology succeeds in, or fails to, change how data is reconfigured into knowledge as well as how knowledge is negotiated and ordered. With this paper I invite further discussion on how we can understand failure of digital technologies in relation to feelings of care as well as how it changes knowledge infrastructures.

Workshops provide a flexible approach to study complex issues through socio-material practices and this paper discusses the methodological considerations involved in doing research through workshops. The paper builds on two research projects where workshops were used to study the practices of professionals’ use of digital tools at a consultancy firm and the everyday life of residents in a newly built city district. While the workshops targeted different groups and had different forms, they both made use of material expressions to visualise everyday practices. We reflect on how we can make use of workshops to study professional and everyday practices and how knowledge is enacted in the different workshops. Building on a socio-material relations approach we discuss our choices in designing workshops, the analytical processes involved and the consequences these choices have on what knowledge we create in interaction with the participants.