Energy Babble: Mixing Environmentally-Oriented Internet Content to Engage Community Groups

The Energy Babble is a kind of automated talk-radio that is obsessed with energy and the environment. We developed it with, and deployed it to, a number of existing "energy communities" in the UK. The system gathers content from a variety of online sources, including Twitter? feeds from the communities, from governmental departments, and from the National Grid, and chats about it continually using a number of synthesised voices interspersed with a variety of jingles and sound effects. Designed to playfully reflect and comment on the existing state of discourse and reports of practice in the UK, the Babble can be considered both as a product and as a research tool, in which role it worked to highlight issues, understandings, practices and difficulties in the communities with whom we worked.