Applying value sensitive design (VSD) to wind turbines and wind parks: an exploration

Area of Science:

• Environmental Social Science
• Technology and Society
• Renewable Energy Studies

Background:

• Community acceptance of wind energy projects remains a significant challenge.
• Traditional explanations like the 'Not in My Backyard' (NIMBY) effect are increasingly criticized for overlooking moral, ecological, and aesthetic values.
• Existing research often focuses on stakeholder attitudes or behaviors, neglecting the design of the 'objects' of opposition: wind turbines and parks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and explore Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as a novel approach to address community acceptance of wind energy projects.
• To investigate how VSD can be applied to the design of wind turbines and parks to better embed key societal values.
• To expand the application of VSD beyond technical artifacts to socio-technical systems like wind parks.

Main Methods:

• Critical discussion of the concepts of 'acceptance,' 'acceptability,' and 'support' in the context of wind energy.
• Review of existing literature on ecological and aesthetic considerations relevant to wind turbine and park design.
• Conceptualization of wind parks as socio-technical systems for VSD application.

Main Results:

• Identifies ecological and aesthetic values as crucial 'building blocks' for an integrated VSD approach.
• Highlights challenges in applying VSD to wind park projects, particularly in defining project boundaries and conceptualizing them as socio-technical systems.
• Suggests that VSD offers a valuable outcome-oriented perspective to complement existing process-oriented approaches.

Conclusions:

• Value Sensitive Design (VSD) offers a promising avenue for designing wind turbines and parks that resonate better with community values.
• Applying VSD to wind parks as socio-technical systems represents an expansion of current VSD practices and can yield new insights.
• An outcome-oriented VSD approach should be explored as a supplement to, not a replacement for, participatory process-oriented methods in wind energy acceptance literature.