This project will analyze the shaping of emerging sociotechnical smart energy systems, and it will explore the potential for social science engagements with alternative forms of imagination and design. The PI and his team will collaboratively engage with a distributed network of technical experts constructing smart energy systems in Phoenix, AZ and Portland, OR. The project will comparatively investigate how smart energy systems are being developed and deployed in urban centers, how they are being imagined to meet and create desirable forms of social and technological order, and to what extent engagements with diverse technical experts across these systems foster reflexive learning and deliberation over broader emerging alternative forms of social and technological order. The study has the potential to influence socially responsive expert practices and technological design choices; it will assess the effectiveness of the design and deployment of smart grid technologies in terms of whether they are currently advancing the social and public goals that have been invoked to justify them in both national and urban contexts.
The project will explore the relationship between collectively imagined forms of social life including understandings of what is socially good or desirable, technological system design including its situated performance, and intervention-oriented socio-technical integration research (STIR). It combines theoretical work on sociotechnical imaginaries with empirical work on social science engagements by investigating the active performance of sociotechnical imaginaries in everyday technical expertise and the results of social science engagement therewith. The project will also provide theoretical insights into how local situations can generate distinct sociotechnical imaginaries and how they articulate with national discourses. Additionally, the project adapts a demonstrably effective form of collaborative social science engagement with the laboratory to a broad diversity of actor sites (laboratories, utilities, regulators, industry associations, civil society, etc.), and monitors the effects of this collaborative engagement on expert decisions and technological system design over significantly longer periods of time.
