Noisy Engagements: Interdisciplinary Engagements with Energy Communities

In its endeavours towards tackling climate change, energy security and fuel poverty the UK Department of Environment and Climate Change (DECC) has mobilised ‘energy communities’ as another instrument, alongside the rational energy consumer, to localise the issue of energy sustainability in the UK. In this keynote I reflect on the interdisciplinary project ‘Energy and Co-Designing Communities’, that combines STS inflected design research and ethnographic methodologies to explore the meanings and practices of energy demand reduction. In doing so I will report on the key engagements with the volunteer energy communities including field visits, a design research workshop, the deployment of Energy Probes and the production of design workbooks. With these engagements in mind, and drawing on Mariam Fraser’s notion of ‘event’ and Michel Serres’ notion of ‘noise’, I provide theoretical reflection on how such STS and design collaborations with energy communities and energy demand reduction, seek to explore and disrupt what Barry, Born & Weszkalnys characterise as the ‘ontological logic’ of the ethnographic imagination at play in interdisciplinary engagements.