Paper long abstract:

We are working on a research project on flexibility and smart grids in Belgium, in which participate engineers, economists and companies. As a team of designers and anthropologists we are sometimes at odd with this group that is grounded in different epistemic interests. This paper is a reflexive attempt at understanding what are the disciplinary asymmetries, how solidarity is organised between different disciplines, and what we can do as social scientists to do justice to our field observations.

We start with the analysis of the way concepts such as acceptance, resistance, engagement, appropriation, delegation, comfort, flexibility are used in the different disciplines. We show which explicit and implicit assumptions about users' capabilities reflect the disciplinary asymmetries. Users are patently absent from engineer's and economist's models, although they constitute obviously an important part of the smart grid development. Environmental considerations are also usually lacking in current development. In order to alleviate this asymmetry, we are forced to become spokespersons for the "weak actors" of the negotiation process between disciplines and constraints.

In order to examine how the dialogue between disciplines happens, we expand on the concepts of "boundary object" (Star & Griesemer 1989) and "obligation and requirement" (Stengers 2010) to explore how ideas and data are translated and articulated between the disciplines while maintaining asymmetries. For instance, anthropology requires us to transmit the fieldwork veracity. But our obligation is also to provide partners with manageable information. The construction of user "profiles" or "personas" is then a way to establish boundary objects between distinct research practices.