Design anthropology: crafting the future of renewable energy
Interview with Abhigyan Singh about how to reveal energy values and practices
For some time, I’ve been wanting to write about researchers who are finding new ways to bring their knowledge production and practice closer together. Today I see my wish fulfilled with the first of hopefully many editions in a new series called Scholars in Boots.
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The first to show off his boots is Abhigyan Singh. You may remember the name, because I reviewed one of his articles in my special issue on reciprocity. The article discussed the moral complexities of peer-to-peer energy exchange in two North Indian villages. In each village, one person got a solar panel, a charger and a few battery packs, with the full licence to choose how to ‘share’ that energy with others, as they deemed fit.
The results were very interesting. These newly designated energy ‘givers’ had to navigate both market logics and familial and neighbourly relations, negotiating “the obligation to give” with the desire to do some business. (The obligation to give is one of the universal laws of human sociality that anthropologist Marcel Mauss deduced some 100 years ago, by scouring the available ethnographic record. The other two laws were the obligation to receive and to reciprocate, creating the circle of social life).
Perhaps you remember the story. If not, do take a look at it again, it was quite neat.
Ways to pay for energy. Photo taken from Abhigyan’s article
Designing interventions
Perhaps you don’t remember that Abhigyan introduced the solar charger and the battery packs himself. It is part of what he calls design anthropology (following, among others, the authors of this book). Researchers in the energy field often track some sort of intervention in existing energy relations, but usually they are invited – or they invite themselves – to monitor someone else’s intervention. Here, the researcher himself devised one. I thought this would make for an excellent conversation in the debut for this series. Let’s talk shop: what’s this design anthropology, what’s it good for and what challenges does it pose?
Let’s start off with a researcher tracking someone else’s intervention. These interventions are what we call pilots, or, depending on your philosophy, living labs. Is design anthropology like running your own pilot?
Well, no, says Abhigyan. In a pilot, policy-makers or designers already have an idea of where they want to go, it is oriented towards a particular solution. They have a new piece of technology, which is supposed to contribute to individual or general well-being. This piece of technology comes with an idea about how to use it – a kind of behaviour – that would realise that private or public good. The question for the pilot is then – roughly speaking – does it work as intended? Does it trigger the intended behaviour (and does that result in the desired good)?
That’s not the idea behind Abhigyan’s intervention. He uses an ‘intervention’ “as a way to study behaviour when a new technology become available in real world”. The key word is study.
“When I started my PhD, this was way back in 2013, the idea was that with renewable energy technologies, people will start producing energy within their neighbourhood, and exchanging energy with each other. But there was a lack of real world applications still. So a lot of the studies at the time were based on simulations. Researchers would take existing energy consumption data and code such “behaviour” into so-called agents. These agents were built with a number of assumptions from economics.
What I wanted to do instead, is to study the social relations between neighbours in real life and see if other types of values than hitherto imagined would come into play in these energy exchanges, such as sociocultural and moral values. For that I needed to create a ‘living-lab’ in the real world where people had control and choice about whom to give energy and whom not to give energy. [Since the technology wasn’t out there yet], I had to make my own field!”
In other words, when Abhigyan says ‘intervention’ he is creating a space where “emergent, non-dominant or non-existing practices and behaviour” can emerge in the real world so that it could be a ethnographically studied.
That is the crucial difference with the pilot. It is much more open-ended and, therefore, it also cedes much control over the intervention. The energy givers could make up their own mind. It doesn’t aim toward any particular solution, but hopes to obtain a “more nuanced understanding of a phenomenon that hasn't been studied well before.”
This also makes it different from the way designers uses the idea of “intervention”, which, much a like a pilot, is often geared towards solving a perceived problem. While laudable, this approach has been criticized for jumping headlong into a solution, before properly understanding the complexity of a problem and its context. As an alternative, therefore, Abhigyan suggest this “anthropological” twist on the concept. He calls this “knowing by intervening by making”. 😉
Knowing my making. (Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash)
Challenges
We also talked about the difficulties of combining ideas and approaches from various disciplines. You see, while a lot of people may talk the interdisciplinary talk, it’s difficult to actually walk it. Money and posts in academia actually are still divvied up according to disciplinary boundaries. Also, disciplines can safely define problems in their own terms and solve them on their own terms. While that may result in a narrower outlook, its laser focus can also be very powerful.
Abhigyan therefore found ‘interdisciplinarity’ difficult to practice. It all depends on individuals and their beliefs and interests. But if you do find someone curious, open and respectful to collaborate with, it’s worth the uncertainty of navigating unchartered waters.
“you need to have faith that something new gets created that may be of worth, and have the patience while you are making connections and searching for collaborations. I found people [to work with] and I think others will too, if they invest time in actually moving across their own intellectual and disciplinary boundary”.
What about the energy sector? Is there a space for open-ended experimentation there? Is there research beyond the pilot? As you may know, a “user-centric” approach has gained dominance in digital products and reached outwards to other industries as well. Meanwhile,
“the energy sector is a bit slow to change. This has to do with how society traditionally has engaged with energy. We get energy from the centralized grid, and our role is that of passive consumers. We consume electricity for our own purpose and then pay for it. With renewables though, things are changing slowly, where people are acquiring new roles and having more choices and taking more control of the local energy production, distribution and also consumption. As a result, people are being forced to rethink things.”
As long-term readers of this newsletter will know, finding out who ‘the consumer’ is has become a pressing question, but not one that incumbents in the energy sector necessarily know how to answer. Well, maybe this is a new way forward: give people a prototype, let them tinker with it, observe. Rinse and repeat. Just remember to give it to the unusual suspects. It will teach you more.
Thanks a lot to Abhigyan for the talk we had! The extended version of this post on the SLE podcast also contains a discussion about the ethical dimensions of open-ended interventions. If that still doesn’t satisfy your hunger for design anthropology, check out the full transcript of our talk here. If any questions remain after that, you can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn and email!
Do you know of other researchers or teachers who are combining theory and practice? Let me know who inspires you!
For now, all the best,
Marten