Abstract

The increasing positioning of technology as a critical strategy for mitigating the risk of environmental crises has catalyzed the development of sustainable energy technologies. While studies have focused predominantly on identifying factors that may lead to the use of sustainable energy technologies, the outcomes of such use, particularly the humanistic consequences for users’ well-being, remain underexplored in the literature. Understanding the humanistic consequences for users’ well-being remains important as technology must be designed and implemented for and with people while considering the full spectrum of human experience. Accordingly, this study incorporates the sociotechnical perspective into the belief-action-outcome (BAO) framework and constructs a contextualized model to simultaneously examine the drivers and outcomes of the use of sustainable energy technologies. A mixed-methods design is applied to enable deeper insights into the studied phenomenon. The outcomes are measured after a 6-month interval to account for the dynamic nature of citizens’ reactions to sustainable energy technologies. The model is then tested using data from four European Union countries. Our findings highlight the importance of prestige sensitivity, performance and effort expectancy, and gamification benefits in increasing the use of sustainable energy technologies. We further find that the increased use of such technologies enhances social and financial well-being. By contextualizing the BAO framework through a sociotechnical lens, our study thus contributes a theory-guided explanation of sustainable energy technology users’ well-being and offers insightful implications for the design and implementation of human-centered sustainable energy technologies.

DOI

10.17705/1jais.01004

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