Forthcoming in Marres, N. Guggenheim, Wilkie, A. Inventing the Social. Manchester:
Mattering Press.
Designing and Doing: Enacting Energy-and-Community
Alex Wilkie
Goldsmiths, University of London
Mike Michael
Exeter University
Introduction
In this chapter, we report on how an interdisciplinary project – combining expertise in
science and technology studies (STS) and design – that explored, amongst other
things, the ways in which community was ‘made’ through energy. Thinking of energy
as a heterogeneous assemblage that entailed, in this instance, energy policy, funding
opportunities, social and technological innovations, information flows, as well as the
‘stuff’ of energy (e.g. photons, electrons, ground heat, wind-power), we begin to trace
the emergence of distinct ‘communities’ and their interrelations. However, we do not
see this as a simple ‘representational’ project in which we charted this emergence.
Rather, the research we conducted self-consciously contributed to this process of
emergence. Indeed, we designed a technological device – the Energy Babble – to fold
into this emergence, to interject a certain ‘playfulness’ that, hopefully, afforded this
process of emergence new or unexpected avenues and openings. On this score, we see
our methodology as performative. However, the performativity in which we have
engaged is one that, rather than ‘close down’ the enactment of the social (the
community) aspires to ‘open up’, or invent that ‘social’.
In what follows, we provide a brief review of the project and its empirical backdrop.
We go on to note that this project was ‘performative’. Here we go on to specify our
particular version of performativity: in particular, we suggest that many methods can
be regarded as ‘probabilistic’ in that they ‘close down’ the empirical by reinforcing
particular frameworks of analysis, that is, of re-producing existing ‘problems’. By
comparison, we stress that our project aspired to be ‘possibilistic’ insofar as it aimed
to open up – to reframe - the issues at stake, specifically how to understand the
interconnections between community and energy. We illustrate this possibilistic
dimension of ‘making the social’ through an examination of the design of the babble.
We follow this with an extended reflection on the ironies of the project and the babble
– how its possibilistic intent was not always realized, and not always realized in
multiple ways. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the more general
implications of possibilistic research.
Energy Communities
Between 2011 and 2012 the UK Departments of Energy and Climate Change
(DECC), Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), the Welsh Government and
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Sciencewise-ERC (an organisation promoting public dialogue between policy, science
and technology) provided £10 million to fund the exploration twenty-two low carbon
‘test-bed’ communities through the Low Carbon Communities Challenge (LCCC).
The objective of the project was to fund and learn from local community-based
approaches to the implementation of low carbon technologies and measures in
achieving energy-demand reduction and to explore sociological “models of
behaviour”, notably the notion of ‘nudge’ to trigger so-called ‘behaviour change’
amongst the communities. According to the evaluation report (DECC 2012), the
LCCC project saw the delivery of 8,206 low carbon measures, including but not
limited to the installation of low energy light bulbs, boiler jackets, biomass district
heating systems, solar photovoltaic (PV) installations, air source heat pumps, wind
turbines, triple glazing, ‘smart’ energy monitors, as well as community evaluation and
infrastructure projects including low carbon vehicles and car clubs, home visits and
energy assessments, community ‘hub’ buildings, advice sessions, open days and
conferences. The initiatives and measures deployed as part of the LCCC implicated a
wide range of ‘stakeholders’ as constituents of energy communities. Accordingly,
(energy) ‘community’, in this sense, can be seen as an object and instrument of UK
government policy with which to cut-across and include a diverse range of local
actors and settings involved in energy-demand reduction such as local authorities,
third sector organisations, local enterprises, households, individuals, energy
companies, social interests groups, resident associations, transition groups and so on.
The overall ambition of the LCCC was to inform and contribute to the UK
government target (DECC 2009) of delivery 34% carbon emissions reductions by
2020 as well as an energy supply target of 15% sourced from renewables (30% of
electricity), also by 2020.
In the direct aftermath of the LCCC, and as a means to further build on and sustain
the many concrete initiatives that emerged as part of the programme the Research
Councils UK (RCUK) led a further programme of research into energy communities
as part of its ‘Energy Programme’.1 This initiative, led by the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC), funded seven projects that aimed to assess, evaluate and report on
the communities that participated in the LCCC as well as explore further
developments with community-based carbon reduction and environmental action. One
project within this initiative, and the focus of this chapter, was the project
‘Sustainability Invention and Energy Demand Reduction: Co-designing communities
and practice’ (ECDC). Here, ECDC specifically responded to the call for projects to
“work directly with communities to examine how individuals and communities use,
and manage energy, and help them find ways to reduce energy demand.” 2
Furthermore, and (with some circumspect) drawing on Wenger (1998), the project
aimed to address communities of energy-demand reduction practice and how such
practices raised issues about the nature of social and technical practices, notably
demand reduction and resource management – a key objective of UK energy policy
through measures such as the replacement of fifty-three million domestic gas and
electricity meters with so-called ‘smart’ energy monitors and ‘In-Home Displays’
(IHDs) by 2020 (DECC 2013: 6).
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If this formed the backdrop to the project, it soon became apparent that the efficacy of
feedback and monitoring technologies as well as the very premise of ‘behaviour
change’ (Dietz et al. 2009) had been subject to considerable dispute, not least in the
following ways. First, the introduction of smart monitors in the home is part of
broader UK environmental policy objective to effect ‘behaviour change’ in the home
where a benign informational ‘nudge’ is considered an effective intervention into
routine energy consumption practices (Darby 2006, Burgess and Nye 2008). Through
empirical evidence, however, recent scholarship has begun to refute the effectiveness
of behavioural intervention. Feedback technologies, and energy-saving technologies
more broadly, have been seen to give rise to the ‘boomerang effect’ (Schultz et al.
2007) where perceived savings lead to an actual increase in energy use or little or no
change (Buchanan et al. 2015). Second, the preoccupation with behavioural
intervention as a means to address energy consumption side-lines, or simply ignores,
the sociotechnical settings of energy consumption practices (Shove 2003, Hargreaves
et al. 2010) and the sophistication of energy consumers (e.g. Strengers 2013). As
such, recent scholarship has begun to question how individuals-as-energy-users are
configured as calculative actors capable of reflecting on and making rational decisions
about energy consumption irrespective of the situated complexities of energy demand.
Indeed, as Marres (2012) notes, drawing on Callon (2009), carbon accounting
technologies, notably smart meters, ‘co-articulate’ the simultaneous enactment of
multiple registers including politics, economics and innovation. That is to say, such
technologies elicit and mediate environmental action, political engagement and
domestic comfort simultaneously. Taken alongside Shove’s emphasis on social
practices which similarly embeds the energy user within a nexus of technological,
cultural and corporeal relations, it is clear that there are emerging alternatives to the
‘economisation’ of the energy user, with its focus on the rational, calculative
individual of energy-demand reduction. In this context, it is unsurprising that the
literature on feedback technologies that purportedly reduce energy-demand calls for a
more nuanced, ‘thicker’, understanding of the energy-user as constitutively situated
within a sociotechnical assemblage. Such a view can also be set alongside a
longstanding preoccupation within STS with the development and deployment of
energy-related technologies and the more or less problematic attempts to enrol users
figured into particular ‘innovation’ initiatives. For instance, we can point to such
classic studies as: the (failed) development of electric cars (Callon 1986); the
prospective users of a mass transportation system (Latour 1996); the ambivalence of
citizens in the Ivory Coast (Akrich 1992); and the interpretive actors constructing the
meaning of electric light bulbs (Bijker 1995).
With all this in mind, the ECDC project set out to avoid narrowly conceived
assumptions about what constitutes a ‘community’, not least one that is composed of
the rational, calculative energy-users figured in energy policy and much supporting
literature. In so doing, the approach taken was shaped by the particular interests and
make-up of the project team, notably a combination of HCI approaches to ludic
design (Gaver 2002) as well as speculative design (Michael 2011, Wilkie et al. 2014)
– where designed artefacts are deployed to explore the prospects of technology and
everyday life – and sensibilities in STS attuned to the empirical study of ‘social’
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processes involving heterogeneous mixtures of human and non-human actors. As
such, the ECDC project set out to question, challenge and explore core assumptions at
play in energy policy as well as energy literature, namely the instrumentalised
characterisation of ‘communities’ as morally responsible collectives of rational
citizens (c.f. Rose 2000). Such communities can be understood as novel objects of
policy that sit between measures for disciplining the conduct of individuals and
broader policy instruments, such as cap-n-trade economies of market based emissions
trading. In contrast, the mixture of design and STS that comprised ECDC was
sensitised to both rational and non-rational meaning and practices as well as
collectives that did not privilege or reduce communities to human actors, let alone
human actors of a particular sort. So, while we began with a view that communities
are constructed (eg Cohen, 1985), we regarded their construction to be a
heterogeneous process, one in which ‘technological practices’ could be seen to be
constitutive of ‘hybrid communities’ (Callon 2004). However, as we discuss in the
next section, the character of methodology went beyond the mere documentation of
such constructive heterogeneity: as we discuss in the section, we as researchers we
intimately implicated in this constructive process.
Method and Metaphysics
As a collaborative project that spanned social science and design, ECDC can be
understood in numerous ways. From a social scientific perspective, it is a speculative
approach that assumes the performativity of its methods in ‘making’ of its objects of
study. This view of method has become a commonplace, perhaps best articulated in
the work of John Law (2004). For Law, ‘reality’ is in flux, characterised by
emergence, relationality and multiplicity. In trying to study such a reality one is
necessarily performing or enacting it, and, in some ways, fixing it. Rather than
method, Law prefers the notion of method assemblage: this enables us to address the
fact that any methodological engagement entails, on the one hand, many levels (e.g.
affective, pragmatic, political as well as epistemic aspects), and, on the other, a partial
process of rendering relations – relations which both reflect the flux and complexity
of that reality and necessarily delimit that reality. There is, as Law remarks, a
“crafting of a bundle of ramifying relations that generates presence, manifest absence,
and Otherness” (Law 2004: 45). Nevertheless, the notion of ‘method assemblage’
allows us ‘imagine more flexible boundaries, and different forms of presence and
absence” (p. 85). In particular, we can also begin to imagine this as a process whereby
these different forms of presence and absence are partially constitutive of the
researchers themselves. That is to say, the method assemblage (which includes the
researchers, of course) in its multiple relationality with the ‘world-in-flux’ is itself
subject to emergence.
This argument can be approached through the notion of the event. Drawing on the
process metaphysics of Whitehead, Deleuze and Stengers, the event is an ‘actual
occasion’ that is comprised of social/material, micro/macro, human/nonhuman,
cognitive/affective elements (or prehensions). These ‘concresce’, in Whitehead’s
([1929] 1978) terms, to yield a momentary durability or ‘satisfaction’. Crucially, one
can regard this concrescence less as a matter of interacting elements (which retain
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their identity) and more as one of intra-action (Barad 2007) in which prehensions
mutually change, co-become, or become-with one another. Assuming that a method
assemblage is a part of the concrescence that makes up the ‘research event’ (which
can range from a single interview to an extended period of participant observation, or
a multi-sited ethnography), then it too can co-become with other elements (e.g. human
and nonhuman participants). This also raises the intriguing spectre that what is
happening is not ‘research’ but something rather different. No longer is it simply a
matter of a research question being addressed, rather the grounds of the empirical
engagement begin to shift.
This account of the research event borrows heavily from Isabelle Stengers’ (2005)
cosmopolitical proposal. Accordingly, when political actors interact, they can cobecome in the process reformulating not only their own interests, but also the very
point of the ‘cosmopolitical event’. In other words, instead of seeking answers to a
pre-existing question, issue or problem, the question or issue or problem has itself
shifted. With such a shift comes the prospect of formulating a more interesting issue,
or posing better, more relevant questions, that is of engaging in, as Mariam Fraser
(2010: 78) puts it, ‘inventive problem-making’. Two challenges arise here. First, how
can (energy-demand) problems be induced to express their relevance in and to the
research event, something we address in what follows in the literal form of a designed
research device. According to Fraser (ibid.), the “(ethical) obligation here, in other
words, is not to solve a problem, or to explain it away but rather to try to enable it to
‘speak’ or to pose it in terms that enable it to play itself out in productive ways.”
Second, and given the researchers constitution in the research event, how to speak
about the event without explaining it away as if from nowhere (Haraway 1988: 581)?
In other words, how to be situated in the research event and contribute to its
becomings and problem articulation?
One upshot, and as a response the challenges posed above, is that the ‘research event’,
by virtue of both ‘making’ and ‘being made by’ its objects of study, can take on a
more speculative tenor. As social scientists, we need not address ourselves to a
shifting reality in which we are methodologically embroiled and epistemically
emergent, in terms of our usual analytic frameworks. Perhaps we can take a more
speculative tack and re-envision the research event, and imaginatively reformulate the
issues at stake in it. Following Stengers (2010: 57), we might wish to develop an
approach that “affirms the possible.…actively resists the plausible and the probable
targeted by approaches that claim to be neutral.”
One might be tempted to read into this phrase an opposition between the possible and
the probable. We tend to see these as tendencies that range over a no doubt multidimensional spectrum and as such we prefer to use the terms probabilistic and
possibilistic. Indeed, as we shall see below, the relation between these is rather more
topological with what is to count as possibilistic or probabilistic being an emergent
and relational property rather than something that can be measured against external
criteria (Lash and Lury 2007). For the moment, however, we want only to note that
our methodological entrée into the empirical field, which we briefly summarized in
the preceding section, was a multivalent one, though our focus and that of our
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participants’ was mainly upon the speculative device of the ‘Energy Babble’ (see next
section). In other words, within our method assemblage, there was a battery of
elements – devices such as cultural probes (Gaver et al. 1999) and the project website,
engagements such as probe workshops and site visits, re-scripting workshops to trace
and interrogate the geographies of delegation (Akrich 1992: 206) materialised by
existing feedback devices, experimental and evaluative prototypes, individual
relations (though these born as much out of the contrast with other projects in the
programme and the government funding regimes to which the communities were
connected), and so on. While our focus remains on the Babble, what the Babble ‘is’,
and what it lures and co-becomes with, is multiple (Mol 2003) – and multiple in the
sense of being variously probabilistic and possibilistic. Phrased in the language of
‘inventing the social’ our method assemblage of devices, engagements, bodies, etc.
serves in the topological enactment of energy-and-community as at once marked by
inventive problems and standardized questions.
The Energy Babble: a design device and the possible
At the beginning of the project it was not evident that the interdisciplinary team of
designers and social scientists (of which we were part) would design a research device
in the form of a ‘product’ or appliance. However, through an engagement with and
exploration of the problem space of ‘community-scale’ energy demand reduction –
including but not limited to ‘ethnographic’ and designerly contact with seven existing
energy-communities, an investigation of environmental and energy-demand reduction
technologies, reviewing energy literature and policy as well as design propositions in
the form of design workbooks (Gaver 2011) – the design team began to focus on the
design of a device that would itself playfully mediate the problem space of energydemand reduction.3 In part, this was inspired and informed by four pronounced design
‘directions’ that gained traction during the project: 1) Energy Tourism: how
sustainability changes our relation to visible energy infrastructures; 2) Insistent
Activism: how to re-situate and reformat discourses of the environment and
sustainability in unfamiliar, unpredictable or inappropriate ways and settings (e.g.
apart from formal community meetings) and how to open up such discourses, which
had hardened around known problems and solutions (e.g. behaviour change and offthe-shelf green industry technologies such as PV installations); 3) Energy Awareness:
how to support communities of practitioners in sharing their experiences, expertise
and successes (or failures), and; 4) Cosmopolitical Energy Communities: who or what
are the members of energy communities and what are their dynamics? Here, the
increasingly salient role of Internet and social media in mediating environmental
discourse and action as well as community initiatives sensitised us to the emergence
of novel practices as well as energy actors, such as Bots (Wilkie et al. 2014). 4
As these interests coalesced and concretised (over the period of a year), we
formulated a design brief to synthesise our examination of the design space and to
precipitate the design of the research device: “Design an Energy-Babble system that
displays material, collected from some combination of individual, community and
publics sources, to open and promote constructive affect and involvement in energy
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reduction issues and orientations. More specifically, the system should support
understandings of, and practices related to, energy demand reduction.”
Over the next eighteen months, the team designed what became the Energy Babble
(see Figure 1 below), which took the form of (or parodied) a networked audio
information appliance – to be given to community members – that vocalises (quite
literally speaks out using software based synthetic voices) Internet sourced and
community contributed content. Suffice to say, this involved much aesthetic and
technological expertise and work including a combination of graphic, product, sound,
software and electronics design.
The resulting design and system consisted of twenty-eight individual devices the
audio content of which was produced and managed by an online server-based content
scraping, audio generation and distribution system featuring algorithmically sourced
and generated environmental and energy-related content.
Figure 1: The Energy Babble.
The Energy Babble device combined a Raspberry Pi computer, a loudspeaker, a WiFi card, a soundcard, a memory card (for the OS) as well as two blown-glass sections,
an injection moulded main enclosure and microphone handset, a 3D printed volume
knob and internal support structures, and a large-diameter cable to connect the
microphone handset to the main enclosure. The server software, which provides and
manages the audio content of the babble included software routines and algorithms to
retrieve web-based content including:
•
Scraping Twitter™ feeds from a range of pre-identified energy-related feeds,
including the communities, local and national government, energy and green
industry, as well as activists and other implicated actors;
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•
•
•
•
Querying Twitter™ for the occurrence of particular search terms such (e.g.
‘climate change’, ‘energy bills’, ‘renewable energy’);
Querying Twitter™ for the occurrence of tweets that include the text string
“switched off the…” and returning a list of things (broadly put) reportedly having
been turned off.
Scraping textual content from URLs that are returned in tweets as part of Twitter
queries.
UK National Grid status updates including current demand, carbon intensity, as
well as the ratio of sources (coal, combined cycle gas turbines, nuclear, wind).5
In addition, the server software also managed the input of content from the
community members who used the device including a variety of questions and
prompts that were sporadically spoken through the device. This was, in part, a means
to invite users to contribute content by using the microphone handset to communicate
with others using the system.
Lastly, and notably, the system featured a Markov Chain algorithm, which used the
corpus of content generated from the above routines, to probabilistically produce new
and often ‘locally’ intelligible (to the systems collection of) text strings. In other
words, the Markov function takes the words of others (human or non-human) and
produces new content, sometimes appreciable, at other times nonsense.
When running, the Energy Babble system provided a sporadic interplay of spoken
statements, evocative of talk radio, drawn from the pool of content provided by the
sourced content, the algorithms and community inputted messages. Each message was
cued by a short jingle, indicating and segmenting the spoken feeds and, in the main,
the content comprised of energy and environmental news, reports of energy practices,
and other matters relating to sustainability. Often, though, other content and topics
entered into the speech, as much a result of the source and the Markov-generated
interjections.
In total, twenty-one Energy Babble devices were deployed to members of the seven
energy communities we had engaged, each community receiving three to four
devices, and often handing over the device to other community members after a
period of use. The handing-over of the devices was conducted at pre-organised
community events, events organised specifically for the handover, or to individual,
typically prominently active, figures, where appropriate. The deployment continued
for approximately six-months, during which time members of the team repeatedly
visited the communities and listened to the ensuing content using a device set-up in
the team’s studio or at home.
At base, the Energy Babble (the combination of the networked devices and the serverbased system) was a research device designed to open up how local communities
engage with energy matters (news, views, practices, experiences, demand) as well as
live with and include an energy-related and consuming technology as part of their
everyday practices. On the one hand, the Energy Babble sought to mediate and
explore how the seven communities share information as well as experience its
multiplicity, utility or otherwise. On the other hand, the device also sought to occupy
and actively articulate (expressing, connecting) the problem space of energy-demand
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and carbon reduction by scrambling, interjecting and provoking, or inviting,
responses. How might the communities react to the presence of, or participate with,
the Babble with all its idiosyncrasies and playfulness in what are, after all, issues of
the utmost urgency? Rephrased in the terms of the preceding section, the Babble was
designed to nurture a ‘possibilistic research event’ in which the users might begin to
co-emerge with the Babble and thus pose more interesting questions about energy
demand reduction, about the nature of ‘community’ and its embroilments with energy,
and about the meanings of ‘energy information’ and its movements (not least
‘through’ and ‘across’ communities).
In what follows we consider some of the ironies of the implementation of the Babble.
While in this section we have gone into detail about the design intent and effort that
went into the Babble, the Babble does not stand alone. It is part of a method
assemblage in which it arose amongst existing relations to the communities (and
particular figures within those communities) and to a series of enactments of energy
politics by both the communities and the members of the research team. As such,
while we reflect on some of the reactions to the Babble on the part of community
members, we mainly focus on those bits of the method assemblage that militated
against a possibilistic research event. Put another way, we begin to trace how the
inventiveness of the invention of the social through the research process, despite the
best of intentions, can become diluted.
Assembling Energies, Communities and Ironies
The team’s initial contact with energy communities came about through a one-day
event organised on behalf of the RCUK energy programme at a hotel in Central
London for all the award holders. A key aim of this event, as it turned out, was to
introduce and, preferably, match communities to research teams and, thus, to initiate
longer-term research engagements. This was done by way of presentations and
posters (summarising each project), which the research groups brought to and
displayed on the walls of the conference room. Representatives of LCCC
communities, present at the event, were invited to approach research teams whose
research interests matched their local efforts, initiatives and interests. The vivid
yellow poster for ECDC described our research process in three stages (investigation,
batch production of speculative devices and ethnographic engagement) and portrayed,
using photographs, two previous research devices (i.e. Gaver et al. 2010, Gaver et al.
2011) in order to communicate, what was in contrast to other projects, a more unusual
approach. Both here, and during the follow-up meetings at and with the communities
that approached the team during the event, it became apparent that many community
members viewed ECDC as a curiosity in that it did not promise a technological fix,
clear solutions nor epistemic assurances. Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of
utilitarian or instrumental expectations, however, the communities were drawn to the
prospect of hosting and living with an exploratory device as part of their routine
energy practices (neither we nor they know exactly what the device would be, beyond
being a discrete product-like appliance). We speculated at the time that the relative
popularity of the ECDC project lay not only in its novelty, bit in its contrast to
standard social methods – methods which the energy communities had long been
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exposed to as, or so we were told, one of the most researched populations in the UK
(e.g. Clark 2008).
Notwithstanding the team’s seemingly successful efforts to frame the initial
expectations of the communities, during the handover of the Babble to the community
members – approximately two years after first meeting – the expectations elicited
again relied upon, or required the device to address utilitarian demands. Upon
receiving the device, G, from the Meadows, for example, exclaimed: “We thought we
were going to get a gizmo to save energy.” Another Meadows member asked if
DECC was going to receive a Babble so that they could complain directly to the UK
Government about an ongoing dispute with British Gas. A retired engineer from Rye
Harbour, near Hastings, asked: “How does this improve the social operational
wellbeing of the people who use it? If I make an investment, how do I get a
payback?” and continued: “I wanted it to solve a problem.” At Woodlands Valley
Farm (an organic farm and conservation and sustainability activity centre), in
Laddock, members of the Laddock Grampound Road Transition Group were initially
perplexed, though curious, when introduced to the Babble. Their expectations altered,
however, by way of an electrician who interceded as an impromptu spokesperson for
the Babble. The electrician quickly cottoned-on the fact that the Babble used a
Raspberry Pi, a ‘British’ technology which he was already using at the heart of his
home-made low-powered home media centre, and that the Babble could be
repurposed (a common response across the communities) as a way to report on and
broadcast the state of his experimental car battery operated home electricity system.
In doing so, he also quelled the members concerns over the Babble’s energy
consumption and advocated the pedagogic prospects of the Raspberry Pi, suggesting
it could help members undertake their own experimental projects. J, from Sidmouth,
echoed the impulses of the electrician to reconstruct the Babble by suggesting that it
could use the Internet connection of a mobile phone and be powered by a car to allow
for some kind of ‘mobility’.
Similarly, when deployed to the members of Energise Hastings, during a routine
meeting at which representatives of Hastings Borough Council were present, the
Babble was first likened to a smart monitor and its adoption was framed in terms of
extending or integrating into existing feedback technologies. Crucially, it was also
viewed as a device that could be enrolled for marketing purposes, as one member put
it: “That is a very powerful sales tool.” Latterly, however, the views of the members
changed, typified by one member’s response: “It’s a new type of thinking, you don’t
know what you’ll get, it might just be chaos.” Thus, at Hastings, and at Reepham and
at Sidmouth, the Babble became construed, in part, as a device that could be enrolled
to play a role in community ‘outreach’ and awareness activities and thus operate to
persuade people to become involved in sustainable issues and practices as well as
interest prospective community members.
Now, this instrumentalized view of the Babble does not simply reflect the practical
‘interests’ of these members of energy communities. It is also partly in response to the
way that we ourselves presented the Babble. The process of implementing a
speculative device involves presenting it as something strange or novel – however,
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this strangeness and novelty cannot be so extreme as to be threatening (as opposed to
promising – see Michael in press): as such, ironically, the temptation is to temper the
novelty or strangeness by suggesting that the device also has practical uses. In other
words, the research event is affected by the ways in which we as researchers gave off
mixed messages, that simultaneously performed, our speculative device, the Babble as
both speculative and instrumental. We can see this contortedness of out enactment of
the Babble in the ways in which it is described in the Figure 2 (an article on the
Babble in the November 2013 issue of Reepham Life). On reading the article, and Bill
Gaver’s account, one is left with a sense of quasi-instrumentality, to coin a phrase:
there are hints at the Babble’s ‘oddness’ but also at its ‘utility’, though these are never
quite clear. On reflecting on our own practices of implementation – especially in how
we described the Babble to our energy community participants - we detect a similar
ironic contortedness of trying to express both the strangeness and utility of the device,
to at once excite and reassure its prospective users.
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Figure 2: The Energy Babble, held by project member Matthew PlummerFernandez, as featured in the November 2013 issue of Reepham Life.
Having made these observations, we can nevertheless note the variety of ways in
which the Babble was instrumentalized: as an energy saving gizmo, as a means of
direct communication, as a problem solver, as model use of Raspberry Pi, as a
marketing tool. Indeed, we can suggest that these cumulative instrumentalizations
imply a possibilistic opening up of the very idea of the instrumental in relation to
energy demand reduction. In other words, there is a second-order irony at play here.
Especially if these accounts of instrumentality were circulated via the Babble, there is
a possibilistic prospect of speculative reflection on – that is, asking more interesting
questions about – the meaning of what counts as ‘instrumental’ (and this includes
cognate terms such as practical, utility, or problem-solving). Moreover, there arises
the possibility of using the Babble to pose more interesting general questions about
the complex ‘practical’ purposes that might attach to communities-and-energy.
By contrast to (the ironies of) this highly instrumentalised view of the Babble, other
rationalities or sensibilities were also evident across the communities. For example, D
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from the Meadows, announced that she would name the device “Finnegan” in
reference to James Joyce’s literary stream of consciousness style. An artist, also from
Meadows, who was somewhat engrossed by an experimental form of sustainable
living in a low-energy eco home, designed with her husband (an architect) and built
on industrially polluted land, characterised (perhaps unsurprisingly) the device as an
intercom-like “Art Babble”. Soon after receiving a Babble, J from New Cross sent an
SMS: It’s amazing! I love it so much already. The messaging system reminds me of
the barbed wire telephone system in Wild West. Seriously – Google it. Thanks guys
:).” On first reading, this might suggest that the instrumental can also be side-lined
and the aesthetic privileged. However, the ease of such a categorization (at least
amongst some participants) might, ironically, imply a ‘closing down’ or probabilistic
enactment of the Babble’s speculative role. So, insofar as it can be categorized as an
‘aesthetic other’ it might leave untouched the probablistic instrumentalized businessas-usual of the communities-and-energy.
So far, we have looked at the initial reception received by the Babble. We now reflect
on how it was enacted over the course of its implementation in various private and
public spaces. As above, there was a marked on-going appreciation of the Babble as
an aesthetic artefact as well as a novel technical device. R, from Reepham, described
the device as “beautifully well made in hand blown glass”, and P from the Meadows
called it a “really nice object.” However, here we concentrate on how the varieties of
instrumentalization of the Babble, not least with regard to the utility of the
‘information’ which it broadcast. It was clear that there were two key issues here.
Firstly, there was the issue of type of information. Thus, during use, the
‘germaneness’ of the Internet-sourced content that the Babble recurrently uttered was
called into question, although what counted or was construed as appropriate varied
across communities and members. J, from the Meadows, who used the Babble in her
office at the local social club, suggested that the device could have a “filter”
(reporting on government and community rather than oil and gas) since it vocalised
much extraneous information. M, from Hastings, who viewed the content as a
reflection of the complex milieu of community energy demand, related how the
repetitiveness of the content suppressed the relevance of the Babble (a view shared by
J from Laddock). At the same time, M noted the similarities between the Babble’s
information and the content of conversations on and around the topic. Secondly,
‘germaneness’ was also shaped by the ‘timeliness’ of the Babble’s broadcasts. Here, J
remarked how the Babble would not speak “on cue” and that once spoken, messages
could not be retrieved. Neither of these observations should come as much of a
surprise: we would expect that an instrumental enactment of the Babble would focus
on the content and timing of its messages. However, more intriguing was the ways in
which the instrumentalization of the Babble spun out to take in other elements of its
‘milieu’ within the communities-and-energy.
To put this another way, the eventuation of the utility of the Babble brought into play
a series of other elements. These can be summarised as: the siting or placement of the
Babble; the timing of its installation; and its connectedness to other issues and
concerns. Re siting, returning to Figure 2’s article in Reepham Life, this features the
Reepham Green Team who invite suggestions for further installation sites for Babble.
Page 13 of 18
Re timing, R, at St Leonards, says: “if you had given this now, then it might have
been more useful to me”. R reported using the device as part of the energy initiatives
he was involved in, such as an energy advice event at Bexhill which, he claimed,
attracted 400 people, most of whom wanted advice on their energy bills. R also used
the Babble in efforts to partner with a Dutch energy supplier in order to market and
sell community tariffs to individuals. Most notably, R made repeated reference to the
recent emergence of Community Energy South – a meta-community of sorts – that is
itself a partnership of energy community groups across the South of England. The
Babble could have been instrumental in this process had its timing been better. Re
connectedness, the Babble’s utility was also played out as an aspect of proximity to
other energy issues. In Laddock, for example, J spoke of how the Babble echoes her
involvement with Christian Aid and Credit Unions, where energy issues are
associated with issues of poverty (which overspill often parochial UK concerns with
the environment and technology). The Babble also connected, according to J, to the
relation between energy and the agricultural sector (in which individuals are
employed and with which communities are engaged).
Taking all this together, we see how the typical ‘problem’ of instrumentalizing the
Babble in pursuit of the probabilistic enactment of community-and-energy (business
as usual, as it were) also shades into a possibilistic eventuation of community-andenergy. For example, the various attempts to make the Babble useful suggest that
interesting problems can be posed about what counts as community-and-energy.
What we see in the above brief examples are attempts to make the Babble
‘informative’ – attempts that draw in the Babble’s spatial and temporal setting and its
‘issue connectedness’. Along the way, we also glimpse a more possibilistic rendering
of community-and-energy where the spatial, temporal and substantive (ie content-ful)
parameters of a community are questioned. The sorts of questions that come to mind
might include: Where are the ‘right sites’ for the Babble, sites which recreate or
challenge a sense of a discrete community-and-energy? How does the Babble evoke
other versions of community-and-energy (e.g. around international poverty) and how
do these fuse with, or become differentiated from, the local community-and-energy
where the Babble is installed? How does the timing of the arrival and installation of
the Babble affect the ongoing enactments of a particular community-and-energy, as
some of its members forge connections into other collectives?
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we have attempted to trace out how a particular Design and Social
Scientific interdisciplinary project might speculatively engage with communities-andenergy. The key methodological intervention – the Energy Babble – was designed to
enable people playfully to explore the character of energy demand reduction and thus
of those communities. As such, our aim was, via the Babble, to ‘invent a social’ that
was possibilistic – that opened up unforeseen or not-as-yet version of the social (more
specifically, the communities-and-energy). As it turned, partly through certain tacit
enactments of Babble by the research team (i.e. the de facto focus on the possible
utility of the Babble) and the responses of the participants, we were faced with many
instances of how the Babble was variously instrumentalized. However, rather than
Page 14 of 18
simply see these as probabilistic enactments of the Babble in which communities-andenergy emerged more or less unaffected (engaged in ‘business as usual’), we also
detected more possibilistic dimensions to these processes. In particular, we suggested
that in the attempt to render the Babble straightforwardly instrumental for the
community the very meanings or parameters of ‘instrumental’ and ‘community’
became open to more interesting questions.
Finally, there is a broader lesson to be drawn here: a speculative reflection on
speculative method itself. If our interdisciplinary methodology was geared to
accessing the possibilistic, it clearly provoked the probabilistic. We hoped to see an
exploration of the possible in relation to community-and-energy; that is, an enactment
of the social that was open and unfolding. Instead we found a probabilistic enactment
– an instrumentalization - of our key methodological tool, the Energy Babble that
seemed to reinforce the existing performances of the social. And yet in this very
process there were hints of a possibilistic enactment of community-and-energy. The
‘anti-speculative’ responses to our speculative enactments ironically yielded a tacit
speculation. Speculative method might thus be speculative not because of its
speculative character or intent, but in spite of it.
Page 15 of 18
Acknowledgements
This chapter draws upon research conducted under the project ‘Sustainability
Invention and Energy-demand Reduction: Co-designing Communities and Practice’
funded by the RCUK and led by the EPSRC (project code ES/1007318/1). The
authors would like to thanks members of the project team including Andy Boucher,
Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovalle and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez. Thanks
are also due to all the participants who gave so generously of their time.
Notes
1
See http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/xrcprogrammes/energy/. Date accessed 11th
May 2015.
2
See http://www.esrc.ac.uk/research/major-investments/energy-and-communitiescollaborative-venture.aspx. Date accessed 12th May 2015.
3
The communities that were engaged as part of the ECDC project were a mixture of
‘first mover’ (recognised by policy actors as exemplars of carbon reduction
initiatives) and ‘second mover’ (showing clear evidence and commitment to cutting
carbon emissions and implementing sustainability measures) communities (DECC
2012: 10) and included: Energise Hastings; Greening Goldsmiths; Low Carbon
Living Laddock; Meadows Partnership Trust (Nottingham); Reepham Green Team;
Sid Valley Energy Action Group, and; Transition New Cross.
4
We are paraphrasing (Gaver et al. 2015) who provide a complimentary discussion of
the design process which gave rise to the Energy Babble. We add a fourth
5
See: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk for an example of online National Grid
status.
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