Feral Experimental

The Interaction Research Studio was invited to show the Energy Babble, as part of the Feral Experimental exhibition at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia. The Energy Babble was developed during the Energy and Co-Designing Communities co-design project between the departments of Design and Sociology at Goldsmiths.

ECDC is a co-design project developed as a collaboration between the departments of sociology and design at Goldsmiths, University of London. Funded by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Energy Programme, ECDC is one of several projects that explore how the United Kingdom can reduce its energy consumption by 80 per cent before 2050. ECDC’s co-design process combines a number of methodologies, including fieldtrips, workshops and the distribution of cultural probe packs in communities such as Whitehill Bordon Eco Town and Low Carbon Living Ladock. The workshops explore questions such as: How is people’s engagement with technology affected by who they trust? The cultural probe packs invite participants to reflect on energy consumption in a number of ways. One is to imagine a conversation between two objects, such as a candle and a hairdryer. Workbooks are another co-designing tool in the ECDC project. They present activities in which participants can reflect on current energy use practices and imagine alternatives. Lead researcher of the project, William Gaver, claims the value of the workbooks is that they demonstrate how ideas can emerge slowly over time from concrete experiments that are generated by multiple stakeholders.

In 2014 ECDC distributed Energy Babble devices to 30 homes. The Energy Babble is a domestic appliance that broadcasts comments and sounds sent from a network of Babbles. The ECDC team describe the Energy Babble as “familiar, playful, [and] ambiguous” and designed to provoke debate within communities. In the Babble network device ECDC explores the imaginative and emotional dimension of energy usage and what they call the “potential aspects of people’s use of technologies”. The combination of fieldtrips, workshops, cultural probe packs and the Energy Babble in ECDC means that this co-design project involves ethnographic processes that generate community reflections on how to reduce demands on energy resources. At the same time, ECDC involves speculative design as it co-imagines alternative possibilities for the future with communities.41 As a result, ECDC engages with both co-design and speculative design and thereby challenges the traditionally demarcated separation between ethnographic research and imaginative speculation