Full interview with Abhigyan Singh

We talk about Design Anthropology and the future of the energy sector

Want to know more about this design anthropology thing? You’ve come to the right place! In this transcript you’ll find us talking about the difference between a “pilot” study and a design anthropological “intervention”; the difference between a design intervention and an anthropological intervention; the difference between action research and interventions; the ethics of research as intervention; the challenges of doing interdisciplinary work and finally, the state of consumer research in the energy sector.

If you want to know more, contact Abhigyan on Twitter, LinkedIn or email!

Of pilots and interventions

Marten

So we are talking to each other because I covered your article in an earlier newsletter about peer to peer energy exchange in a northern Indian village. And in it, you applied a novel methodology, which you called design anthropology. And I'm really curious to know more about your take on this idea of design anthropology as kind of a new field. And I thought maybe we could start out with this one sentence that you wrote, namely that the research that you did by creating this prototypes for a person to share solar energy with members of the village is not a pilot is called an intervention. And can you maybe talk a little bit about what makes the do difference?

Abhigyan

the distinction between pilot and intervention is that pilots are oriented towards a particular solution, as in that a particular group of people should acquire through the pilot certain behaviour which an outsider agency or government has already identify as ‘good behaviour’. So for instance, people using fossil fuel based energy for their energy consumption and a new technology is put in a particular space in form of a pilot. And the evaluation is whether people actually acquire that behaviour, are they able to use that. In my research, I do not aim towards that. I use the ‘intervention’ as a way to study behaviour when certain technologies become available in real world.

So to explain this better maybe I have to be tell you about my own PhD. I was studying inter household, peer to peer, exchange of energy. And when I started my PhD, this was way back in 2013. The idea at the time was that these new forms of technologies, including renewable energy technologies will be taken up by people. That they will be producing energy within their neighborhood, and that they will be transacting or exchanging energy with each other. And the issue was that that there was there was lack of real world context where this could be studied. So a lot of the studies at the time were based on simulations and prediction based on energy data, like how people consume energy, how much is the local production and then simulating behaviour if households started energy exchanging with each other. These behaviours were coded into these so-called agents. [These were built with] a number of assumptions from economics.

Ways to pay for energy. Photo taken from the article.

What I wanted to do, is to study the different forms of social relations between people who live together neighborhoods and villages. To see if different types of values will come into play in these energy exchanges, when they start controlling and having a choice whom to give energy and whom not to give energy, because this was not being talked about. [Since the technology wasn’t out there yet], I had to make an intervention, so that I could study actual inter-household energy exchanges [now].

So in my case, an ‘intervention’ is a platform through which a emergent, non-dominant or non-existing practices and behaviour emerges in the real world so that it could be a ethnographically studied. So it doesn’t aim toward a particular solution, which is a particular behaviour, but it is more an infrastructure through which various such practices or performances could emerge. So that one gets a more nuanced understanding of a phenomenon that hasn't been studied well before.

Marten

So, in a pilot, usually what you do is, okay, so you have a new technology, you put it out there you see if it has the desired effect. If so, you try and deploy more widely, called scaling up, or you have to change the technologies if it doesn't. How does that work for a design intervention?

Abhigyan

So, in this case, in my particular take on how I use designing intervention within my ‘design anthropological’ approach, intervention, stops from suggesting a particular type of behaviour, but it becomes an infrastructure for certain practices and behaviours to emerge. So for instance, in in the context of inter household interaction, there are a number of pilots with a rental model. How people will exchange energy differently aspects of it has been pre-determined by outsiders, like the donor agencies or NGOs or governments or people who want to see this infrastructure put in place, how this infrastructure will be used, while who will pay how much it has been pre-determined, and the evaluation is more about how whether people are able to comply to the structure which has been created.

While in this case, the intervention is more of an open ended platform where people can configure and use it as they want, they may be even using it, which hasn't been intended before. But the idea and the aim is that we want to understand the phenomena, so that even if huge variations emerge we can study and write about and make that clear. So, the whole philosophy of this anthropology through design approach revolves around knowing by intervening and making. Intervention is a central part in making. The intervention [itself] has been pre-determined based on certain criteria. The design aspect has been pre-determined, the prototype or infrastructure that is put in real world context. But then you step away and see what emerges: what type of performances or behaviours emerge through the intervention.

Again, this is of some use in the context of emergent or non-dominant or non-existing behaviours. So, for instance, there are certain behaviours or certain practices which we know may start appearing in the real world, because of the way technologies are evolving new possibilities are going to emerge, but they have not been studied yet. In the case of my PhD, peer to peer energy exchange were expected to start happening, people were already writing about it, but there was no real world data. [But with an intervention you] can actually see how it will happen. So this is where combination of anthropology and design I feel, can help to actually study those behaviours, even before they become in some way mainstream.

Marten

You can create a future by your prototype, let's say.

Abhigyan

Yeah, you create a prototype, and you let people to use that. And then you study that, so that you don't have to wait for such things to happen at a large scale. You create the ethnographic field through the intervention.

Between design and anthropology

Marten

Right, right, right. And so your term intervention is actually comes from design, the design field itself, but you do design anthropology. How is that different?

Abhigyan

Yeah, intervention is heavily used in design. In the design field, design is seen as a solution to a particular problem. And the intervention is one way to solve that problem or one solution to that particular problem. So the intervention is put place in a context as a way to solve a problem, and then the evaluation is how good this intervention was in solving the problem.

In my case, that's not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is to understand a phenomenon which hasn't been understood before. And it may or may not solve a problem, but that's not the main goal.

Action research and ethical interventions

Marten

Okay, this actually brings me to a point that I wanted to bring up because what you do is you intervention, you change something in the local relations in these villages. Now, there is one strand of action research, which is participatory rural appraisal, which you also mention in the paper. In those cases, researchers will also intervene in local relations, but they do have the express purpose to improve the situation of their research participants. In your case, that's not actually not the primary goal. The primary goal is to understand what happens when these new technologies become part of people's lives. So how do you deal with the ethics of this?

Abhigyan

Yeah, I think that's a that's an important and a good question. These ethical issues are a huge part of it and has to be given serious thought. So, in this case, in the context of energy access, when I was working on these, the intervention I made consisted of small solar lamps and power banks, which we could use for lighting and mobile phone charging. Who gets access to this and who became the energy “giver” also acquired the power to say, give energy to somebody and not to give others. It empowers them but it also people who were in some way disenfranchised or did not had access to it, [might end up even worse, relatively speaking]. So one has to be careful when we intervene, we have to reflect and be careful who benefits and who does who does not get any benefit, who gets excluded, who gets included? So these are important aspects and questions to consider.

Probably in this case, the issue was that this is about small-scale energy, while they already had lighting solutions. Even the people who were denied this clean energy, were able to use alternative lighting solutions. If it were in context of healthcare, these questions will become even more important. So my suggestion is that in different contexts, different ethical questions around intervention will emerge. And they have to be properly thought and addressed. One has to be careful in what changes an intervention brings into the social setting.

Marten

Right. So there are maybe some cases in which kind of this open ended approach to an intervention might not be appropriate.

Abhigyan

Yeah, or the meaning of intervention may change. So for instance, if one is studying caste-based discrimination or racial discrimination, which may be [go under the radar], and you want to make an intervention to study that, so maybe the intervention in that context should not aim for actually making racial discrimination happen or emerge from the intervention. In that case [you would need an intervention of a] different kind where people or different stakeholders or citizen groups actually gets to talk about it. An intervention as a way to create a dialogue within or among groups, so that you can study that. So the meaning of intervention will change based on context.

Standing on the shoulders of disciplines

Marten

Right, right. Makes sense. Now that we're in reflective mode anyways, you've done this thing where you can sort of look back on it. Are there things that you have learned about the, maybe the challenges in doing this and maybe ways that these type of methodology can be successful?

Abhigyan

Yeah, so I think one particular challenge is that design anthropology is not yet a very stablished field. Design anthropology does not have a journal, they do not have really any stablished conference, so it's still emerging. And it's somewhere in between design and anthropology, so designers often question me “oh, are you trying to become an anthropologist? Our aim is to solve problems and you are trying to study phenomena, so what's your identity?” Similarly, anthropologists have raised number of questions about the way I write and speak. I haven’t gone through an entire training, I have taken courses in anthropology and I read books by anthropologists and engage with that in my own writing, but still the language, the vocabulary, I bring is very different and they can see I come from a different position. So being in between these two disciplines, which have strong views on what needs to be done, makes things difficult in terms of publications, in terms of job prospects in terms of how you write and how you speak. So these are challenges.

What I find is that there is huge desire for cross disciplinary interdisciplinary work in academia and in the world right now, but actual acceptance of it is still a problem. Even people who write about interdisciplinarity, question one way of writing and speaking and thinking [from a different discipline]. So that's, that's, that's the difficult part.

Marten

Right. And how were you able to do this project anyway? What were the ingredients that made your project possible, despite these obstacles?

Abhigyan

One is to find people to collaborate with. Within these fields, it's not that everyone holds that kind of view, there are people who are interested in new or different views. In my case, I started collaborating with Alex [Strating] who you know, very well, who was kind enough to give me time and was curious about this. I would show him what is emerging in my data, submit questions and he could respond to it and I could integrate it. This was a very fruitful journey for me and for him, but also for the field.

In that sense that anthropology hopefully can see new avenues where anthropological knowledge could be applied and similarly design can [learn from this too]. Already some design traditions are speaking about how designers often quickly jump from problem to making solutions without a nuanced holistic understanding of the problem itself. Design anthropology can slow down this process for designers to become more aware of interconnections and larger social aspects and social factors which may can cause their design to actually negatively influence [the situation]. So these objectives will only arise with these collaborations.

So related to this point, I was initially quite uncertain. This being in between brings uncertainty about your own identity, academic or intellectual. So where are you rooted? I eventually realized that maybe I don't need to rely on these traditions, I am in between them. I took comfort in this uncertainty that it would produce new results. So you need to have faith that something new gets created which 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 also if they invest time in, in actually moving across their own intellectual and disciplinary boundary to speak and find out who would be interested in listening and thinking through and having this trust that they would find something good that they could take forward.

Taking design thinking into the energy sector

Marten

Okay. Now, in part this a very typical academic sort of problem, these disciplines and how to actually transcend them. In industry, this is a little bit different because the disciplines as such don't exist. Have you seen any evidence in the energy field that this kind of transdisciplinary combination of anthropology and design or research and design is happening?

Abhigyan

So, I think the energy sector is a bit slow moving to change. My personal view is that this has to do with how traditionally society has been engaging with energy. So we get energy from the centralized grid, and our role is that of passive consumers. We use electricity for our own purpose, consume energy and pay for it. While with renewables, 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, but the traditional actors or mainstream actors are still [stuck in the] dominant approach towards it, centralized grids model, where the control and the decision making is made by people who are running and working at these companies.

So, energy companies are somewhat slow, but then there are new actors, new forms of energy service providers, which are emerging, and even some big DSOs, that are actually trying to get into this mode of thinking. I'm engaging with them and some of my graduation students are working with them. I’ve been in touch with people from Enexis, who are more open to these ideas, because they also are trying to see with these changes and shifts of energy transition, what new forms they have to acquire what new things they have to enable. So, they are becoming more open to these ideas, more bottom up approaches where some prototype interventions are put in place to understand and giving them different types of ideas about new energy services, which people will acquire. It’s not mainstream yet, but within these larger company, there are people who are interested in in this, who are speaking to me.

On the other hand the tech industry, like ICT, they have been fairly open and they have been engaging with anthropologists and designers together to create solutions and also to understand what new solutions have to be made. There are a number of consultants who also are doing that. So the one irony I see is that in academic Design departments, for instance, speaking of the Netherlands, have not engaged with anthropologists and they're not catering to this labor market, which already exists. And similarly, anthropology departments in different universities in Netherland, they are also not engaging with Design to cater to this market by the market and the labor market already exist. And these companies are hiring anthropologists and designers to come together. And a lot of them become design anthropologists, while working in industry. Academia is not able to match that profile, that kind of collaboration at the institutional level hasn't happened yet.

Marten

Right. So that says steps are definitely things that we should be working towards. At least it seems like in the energy sector, there is some reason to hope that these kinds of new methodologies might find they're used. Yeah.

Abhigyan

Yeah.

Marten

Yeah. And maybe that's a good point to end, on that note of hope. This interview has definitely been very enlightening to me. This is the reason that I wanted to talk to you is because it seems like there is something very valuable here: a new kind of way for both for practitioners, for professionals, as for academics, to kind of think about how to move towards a future that has these as both sustainable energy and more equitable energy relations.

Abhigyan

Yeah, indeed. And thanks for giving me this opportunity to speak!