The Technology and Sustainability research group is an interdisciplinary research environment at SIFO that studies everyday life and consumption as social phenomena, focusing on the conditions for sustainable development and the role of technology in everyday consumption. The research focuses on the structural frameworks that shape households’ opportunities, responsibilities and influence in the transition towards more sustainable forms of consumption as part of the green transition, and on how digital platforms, media and infrastructures are woven into and shape everyday consumption.
The group’s unique expertise within the Norwegian research landscape lies in its combination of research on digitalisation, sustainability, material culture and everyday life, with a particular focus on households, markets, policy and consumer perspectives. Our studies examine technological development, environmental sustainability, the distribution of responsibility and visions of different futures from a consumption perspective. In this way, we generate knowledge that can support targeted policy development and safer, fairer and more sustainable solutions.
Our research focuses on the following overarching questions:
- What are the prerequisites for a green transition and responsible technological development from the perspective of everyday life?
- How is everyday life shaped by markets, politics, technological development and visions of the future, and vice versa?
Through our research, we contribute knowledge that strengthens policy development, promotes consumers’ and households’ perspectives on societal development, and lays the foundations for a safer, fairer and more sustainable future.
The group’s research agenda is organised into three mutually reinforcing pillars. See below for more information about the pillars and our experts.
Digital cultures
Our research on digital cultures demonstrates how digitalisation and new technologies are woven into and shape consumption. We analyse how consumers use, navigate and integrate platforms, devices and infrastructures into their everyday lives. This enables us to empirically study digital consumption in terms of its opportunities, limitations, forms of power and scope for action, competencies and vulnerabilities.
This pillar examines how digital technologies and infrastructures become part of consumer cultures and consumer competencies. We study artificial intelligence, digital platforms, social media, games and gaming, online shopping, sharing economies, digital transactions and datafication. Key themes include commercial pressures and revenue generation, trust, vulnerability, privacy, security and digital consumer protection.
Our experts on digital cultures
Environmental sustainability
In the field of environmental sustainability, we conduct research into sustainable consumption and the green transition. By studying the complex dynamics that shape consumption through everyday practices, material and technological conditions, production and marketing, and policy frameworks, we examine the conditions under which sustainability transitions can be enabled, constrained, and made practically and politically feasible.
Our research on environmental sustainability links sustainable and circular consumption both to households’ everyday lives and to broader political and economic conditions. Rather than isolating consumption as a matter of individual choice, we analyse how regulations, governance frameworks, markets, product systems and cultural norms shape what constitutes sustainable consumption, and how the green transition actually takes place.
Our experts om environmental sustainability
Futures in practice
By analysing notions, expectations and assertions, and tracing possible futures already embedded in infrastructures, institutions and cultures, we study how various opportunities open up and close, how different futures are produced in the present, and which actors are involved in shaping notions of the future.
In this pillar, we investigate how the future is actively produced in the present through conceptions, expectations and promises, expert opinions and assertions, technological development, negotiations, power and cultural practices. The pillar provides a framework for linking innovation, ethics, inclusion, risk and preparedness, responsibility and sustainability to empirical research on contemporary processes of change.
