Wilcox+Research+Design+Grid

=Research Design Grid= James Wilcox, Spring 2013

**AIMS** ||    **QUESTIONS**  || **DATA COLLECTION** || **EMERGING ARGUMENTS** ||    **LITERATURES**  ||
 * Generate new knowledge about the “drivers of energy demand” in “post-industrial” societies. || How do discursive regimes and sociotechnical imaginaries shape the embodied, sociotechnical practices that drive residential energy use?

Why do energy systems largely remain invisible to residential energy users, and with what social-ecological consequences?

How do [collective, institutional, policy/design] interventions aimed at influencing residential energy use shape modes of user engagement with energy systems? || Participant observation of Energy Analysis work

Textual/discourse analysis of policy documents, program promotion materials, energy analysis and “behavior change” literature, and press accounts

Ethnographic observation of energy auditing

Semi-structured interviews with auditors, program participants, and policy analysts

Semi-structured interviews with auditors, “energy managers” and policy analysts, and designers, and residents || Energy is used by practices, not by sovereign subjects.

Practices are complexes of affects, norms, things and infrastructures, habits and routines, desires and knowledges.

Embodied and affective dimensions, such as comfort, anxiety, perceived safety and security, “coziness” play a significant role in energy use.

Intention/volition is but one member of the “ensemble” of forces determining energy use

“The body” is at the center of energy systems and (either acknowledged or unacknowledged) energy discourses || Social practice theories

Imaginaries

Politics of design / technology

“Sustainable consumption” ||
 * Articulate a multi-scalar (micro/meso/macro) cosmopolitics of energy use and experience in everyday life. || How might ethico-political (cosmopolitical?) tensions between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric concerns about energy systems be negotiated? || Textual/discourse analysis of policy documents, program promotion materials, energy analysis and “behavior change” literature, and press accounts

Ethnographic observation of energy auditing

Semi-structured interviews with auditors, “energy managers” and policy analysts, and designers, and residents || Energy fits uneasily within human/non-human dichotomy of ANT-influenced cosmopolitics

//Animacy// is a valuable politico-aesthetic concept in relation to energy systems, sustainabilities, and resiliences

Heterogeneous energy systems serve as mediators between humans and ecosystems || Cosmopolitics

Political Ecology

New Materialism ||
 * Apply insights on energy, infrastructure and everyday life from a qualitative social science/ (post)humanistic perspective to the transition from high-energy to low-energy regimes

(in support of just sustainabilities and resiliences) || How might socio-technical innovations in the area of energy use productively incorporate insights on energy and everyday life?

What strategies and tactics do so and what don’t? Why? || Textual/discourse analysis of policy documents, program promotion materials, energy analysis and “behavior change” literature, and press accounts

Ethnographic observation of energy auditing

Semi-structured interviews with auditors, “energy managers” and policy analysts, and designers, and residents || The relevance of “official” energy narratives and strategies is constrained by their reliance on techno-economic logics

Strategies that treat demand as an effect of infrastructural characteristics and pre-existing regimes rather than a driver will be advisable (i.e. co-management of utility provision)

Local ownership and siting of energy generation are promising strategies to ultimately decrease energy use and promote clean energy. || Democracy and Technology

Social practice theories

“Sustainable consumption”

Design studies / Politics of Design + Technology ||