Understanding the Energy Transition by Analyzing the IT Revolution : An Infrastructural Reading to Direct Design Approaches Toward Energy Sustainability

The paper compares the IT revolution and the energy transition, analyzing the former’s in- frastructural evolution and drawing parallels with the latter. It aims to strategically reinterpret design projects in the context of energy sustainability. The comparison between the electrical energy transfer system and the data transfer system offers insights and operational suggestions potentially transferable from one field to another. Thus, the analysis aims to analyze the limitations and potentials of the logical architecture mod- els of the computer network, which have already been addressed and solved in the past, to re- read the macro-strategies of current energy policies, based on the one hand on a technocratic vision that works on sources and infrastructure (that we can define as client server) and on the other hand on cooperation between actors and society (that we can define as peer to peer). Focusing mainly on this second approach, the paper investigates projects introducing an experimental model – communitarian, collaborative, horizontal, near –, using the IT metaphor as a critical-interpretive analysis capable of opening new reading and development scenarios. The essay intends to systematize the most recent experiments, sometimes still prototypical, conducted between design and art and pilot projects initiated in some European laboratory cities to identify possible strategies and contaminations in light of their energy infrastructure and thus outline a framework of operational strategies for the discipline of design.