Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

This paper aims to contribute to recent innovations in social scientific methodology that aspire to address the complex, iterative, and performative dimensions of method. In particular, we focus on the becoming-with character of social events, and propose a speculative method for engaging with the not-as-yet. This work, being part of a larger project that uses speculative design and ethnographic methods to explore energy-demand reduction, specifically considers the ways in which energy-demand reduction features in the Twitter-sphere. Developing and deploying three automated Bots whose function and communications are at best obscure, and not uncommonly nonsensical, we trace some of ways in which they intervene and provoke. Heuristically, we draw on the ‘conceptual characters’ of idiot, parasite and diplomat in order to grasp how the Bots act within Twitter to evoke the instability and emergent eventuations of energy-demand reduction, community, and related practices. We conclude by drawing out some of the wider implications of this particular enactment of speculative method.

Cloud of Cards, “a home cloud kit to re-appropriate your data self”, is the final outcome of Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), a joint design and ethnographic research project investigating personal clouds and data centers.
The main results of this design research project have been informed by the preliminary findings of an ethnographic research into the cloud (Cloud of Practices) and a design sketches phase conducted in parallel. They comprise four digital and physical artifacts, forming a set of modular tools (“cards”), which are delivered in the form of an open-source DIY kit, freely accessible at www.cloudofcards.org and on Github.
The purpose of these tools is to enable everyone, in particular the community of designers and makers, to set up their own small-scale data center and cloud, manage their data in a decentralized way and develop their own alternative projects using this small-scale personal infrastructure.
With texts by Christophe Guignard, Nathalie Kane, Patrick Keller and Nicolas Nova, interventions by Random International, students from
CAL/MID (Media & Interaction Design) and Alice Lab (EPFL), fabric | ch, and several others, as well as an interview with Matthew Plummer-Fernandez (#algopop).

This is the story of a set of computational devices called Energy Babbles. The product of a collaboration between designers and STS researchers, Energy Babbles are like automated talk radios obsessed with energy. Synthesised voices, punctuated by occasional jingles, recount energy policy announcements, remarks about energy conservation made on social media, information about current energy demand and production, and comments entered by other Babble users.

Developed for members of UK community groups working to promote sustainable energy practices, the Energy Babbles were designed to reflect the complex situations they navigate, to provide information and encourage communication, and to help shed light on their engagements with energy policy and practice. This book tells the story of the Babbles from a mix of design and STS perspectives, suggesting how design may benefit from the perspectives of STS, and how STS may take an interventionist, design-led approach to the study of emerging technological issues.