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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper presents an ongoing research project on digital everyday lives and energy futures in South Africa. We used design anthropological interventions and decolonial design approaches to engage tech entrepreneurs in dialogues involving elements driving their enterprises: technology and energy.

Paper Abstract:

The energy crisis in South Africa is experienced by many when it is load shedding. Due to the ageing coal-fired power stations, which cannot generate sufficient electricity to meet demand, the national power utility Eskom resorts to turning off the power in selected areas for a few hours to avoid national power failure, a process locally known as load shedding. Our project focuses on how tech startups based in the historically racially segregated township on the Cape Flats in Cape Town are affected by the energy crisis and their position in imagining energy futures in South Africa.

We carried out ethnographic research and design interventions to discuss the tech entrepreneur's everyday energy experiences and their relations to colonial pasts and apartheid laws that shaped the Cape Flats and how such experiences influence- and can be used in imagining futures. We draw on decolonial design methods that consider situated pasts as resources for imagining pluriversal futures (Escobar, 2018; Kambunga et al., 2023) - considering how the everyday is always in a state of emergence and that interventions support the process of imagining futures (Smith & Otto, 2016), and in the relations between technologies and energy (Pink, 2022, Waltorp, Lanzeni, Pink & Smith 2023). The tech entrepreneurs, especially those in the Cape Flats, are stakeholders in the energy futures precisely because they are shaping the future of digital technologies with limited energy access and can potentially contribute to imagining futures otherwise.