Paper short abstract:

The STIR Cities project comparatively investigates the development of smart energy systems beyond the lab, how they are imagined to create social and technological order, and whether engagements with diverse technical experts foster reflexive learning and deliberation over broader emerging contexts.

Paper long abstract:

The STIR project coordinated a series of intervention-oriented laboratory engagement studies that suggest social science engagements can enhance both care and creativity within science and engineering research practices. The idea of responsible innovation, however, implicates a diversity of research and innovation contexts that extend beyond the academic laboratory; it also implies that interventions at the level of expert practices be seen from the standpoint of broader socio-political landscapes. Accordingly, the STIR Cities project explores the possibility and utility of social science engagements within two urban settings. In an attempt to methodologically expand and interpretively deepen the STIR approach, we plan to comparatively investigate how "smart" energy systems are being developed and deployed in Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon; how they are being imagined to meet and create desirable forms of social and technological order; and the extent to which our engagements with diverse technical experts foster reflexive learning and deliberation over broader emerging forms of social and technological order. We thus explore the relationship between sociotechnical imaginaries - collectively imagined forms of social life that are "almost always imbued with implicit understandings of what is good or desirable in the social world writ large"; technological system design, understood as situated performance of these imaginaries; and STIR expert engagement studies with a distributed network of technical experts constructing smart energy systems in two culturally and geographically different urban centers. This talk will provide an overview of the project and present the preliminary findings of our empirical and theoretical work.