Eco-visualization technologies aim to trigger more environmental behaviors by providing feedback about the usage of key resources such as energy. However, the design of these technologies to encourage energy conservation has been mainly focused on individual behaviors in a household level. Addressing a different approach researchers at KTH have designed the housing cooperative app, a web application that provides feedback about the collective energy consumption of housing cooperatives in Stockholm, aiming to reduce the cooperative's collective energy use. By using a Research Through Design approach, this thesis explores how data visualization can support amateur energy work through the housing cooperative app. For this, I identified design problems in the data visualization elements of the app, which I aimed to solve by redesigning them; then, I conducted semi structured interviews with amateur energy workers, where they interacted with the application, to generate new insights about how data visualization can be used in an amateur work context. Through the interviews it was possible to obtain qualitative answers about the challenges of amateurs energy workers and the way data visualization could be used to address theses challenges and achieve their goals in an efficient way. The interviews was divided in Background, Amateur work, Comprehension and Usefulness of the data, and were supported by a walkthrough in the application presenting to users different scenarios and features in the application. Results showed the potential that data visualizations have to support amateur energy workers to overcome their main challenges and to identify the rewards of their work. In this thesis I discuss about this potential, and about design aspects that are important to consider when designing eco-visualization technologies in amateur energy context. / I detta examensarbete undersöktes hur datavisualisering kan stödja icke-professionellt energiarbete vid användning av appen utvecklad för bostadsrättsföreningar. För att göra detta användes metoden research through design. Under arbetet identifierade jag problem i appens tidigare design och förbättrade visualiseringselementen. Efter detta utfördes en intervjustudie av semistrukturerad form med icke-professionella energiarbetare som informanter. Under dessa intervjuer interagerade informanterna med appen i ett försök att finna nya insikter om hur datavisualisering kan användas i en icke-professionel kontext.   Intervjuerna var uppdelade i de tre kategorierna: bakgrund om informanten, icke-professionellt arbete samt förståelse och användbarhet av informationen i appen. Under intervjuerna utförde jag en demonstration av appen för att presentera de olika funktioner och scenarier jag ville utvärdera. Intervjuerna gav mig ett kvalitativt resultat med insikter om de hinder som upplevs av användargruppen, och hur datavisualisering kan användas för att åtgärda dessa.   Resultaten visade att datavisualisering har potentialen att hjälpa utövare av icke-professionellt energiarbete. Detta görs genom att underlätta deras uppgifter, samt en ökad förståelse för de positiva konsekvenser det för med sig. Slutligen diskuterar jag potentialen av ekovisualisering, samt de designaspekter jag anser viktiga för utveckling i en icke-professionell kontext relaterat till energi.

The concept of community is receiving increasing attentionacross organizations and throughout the entire society.Voluntary association, creation of value, and solidarity incommunity contexts get more and more appreciated and nurturedwithin companies and other organizations. At the same time,lack of community is raised lately by Western sociologists as amajor source of alarm while the large participationpossibilities provided by the Internet are seen as a hope forremedy. This thesis aims to contribute in the area of technologydesign for communities by seeking to gain understanding ofvoluntary community work and to design artefacts in support forsuch work. Community work is studied through anethnographically-inspired approach for empirical observation ofcommunity activity and the artefacts that support it. Fieldstudy of‘voluntary working order’was conducted inseveral voluntary communities: amateur radio and three studentorganisations. In studying such working order, one mustrenounce a set of assumptions that are commonly made aboutwork, starting with the very idea of remuneration as a basicmotivation. Instead, challenge as a major motivation isproposed for work in voluntary communities. To draw inspirationfor future design, an examination is made of the way thismotivation is reflected in the features of technology createdby the communities for their own use, in the working contextsof the field settings. Lessons learned about amateur work are then used and refinedwhile reflecting on amateur-work-oriented design of ITartefacts conducted within a student organisation, with aparticular interest in self-sustainability of participatorydesign practices in such settings. Practices of participatorydesign are re-considered in the context of voluntary work, theabsence of the employer-employee conflict, the challenges andlearning trajectories of the members. As development is done bymembers of the student community, design interventions forself-sustainability of amateur software development aredescribed and reflected upon. A generic approach is proposedfor action aimed at self-sustainability in amateur settings.The socio-technical features that resemble across thecommunities studied and practices experienced are then groupedunder the generic name of the perspective developed in thisthesis:“Amateur Community”. The perspective isproposed as a point of departure for further study and designintervention in similar communities. Comparisons are madebetween Amateur Community and other approaches such asCommunity of Practice. Keywords:amateur, volunteer, community, work, amateurwork, participatory design, software development, challenge,contingency, pioneering, public, personal development,learning, hands-on learning, selfsustainability / QC 20100420