Digitalisation shapes how we live, relax, interact, shop, travel, and work. But will digitalisation of our daily lives help or hinder efforts to tackle climate change? iDODDLE aims to provide answers by working closely with ‘living lab’ households, trialling new digital services, testing insights in nationally-representative samples, and developing new modelling, assessment and policy evaluation tools.
The project has three main aims:
- To understand the mechanisms through which digitalised daily life impacts carbon emissions. Examples include: substituting physical for digital; accessing services instead of owning goods; and integrating households into supply networks.
- To determine the conditions under which digitalised daily life has beneficial or adverse impacts on carbon emissions. Examples include: access to infrastructure, trust in institutions, and technophile lifestyles.
- To develop an evidence-based programme of action for ensuring digitalised daily life helps reduce carbon emissions. Examples include: quantitative systems analysis of energy and material flows associated with digitalisation at national and global scales.
Our work
Our research activities are organised into three corresponding themes - on people (micro-level), on system conditions (macro-level), and on action (policy and practice).
Within each theme, the iDODDLE team is exploring the changes to our daily lives as a result of digitalisation and the impacts these changes have on carbon emissions. This research draws on two major new sources of data: a sample of 80 living lab households in and around Oxford in the UK; and an online survey panel of 6,000 respondents in UK, Sweden and Spain (countries in Europe which span the digitalisation spectrum).
Examples of digital technologies and applications being tested or explored within the iDODDLE project include smart home technologies, on-demand retail and food services, shared micro-mobility, smart charging of electric vehicles, and domestic task automation.
- For more information, see the iDODDLE website
