Aesthetics and Affect: Engaging Energy Communities

Abstract

Engaging publics in participatory events has been regarded as a central means to introducing lay people's voices into processes of technoscientific innovation and governance. While many criticisms have been levelled at the methods and techniques of participation and engagement, little attention has been paid to the role of aesthetics. This is especially the case when aesthetics is understood in terms of opening up new and potential ways of critically and creatively engaging with technoscientific matters of concern. The terms semblamatic and matters of potentially are proposed as usefully capturing this dimension of aesthetics. Drawing on practice-based design research, a probe workshop was developed and members of energy communities were invited to it. These lay people had an invested interest in reducing energy demand in their communities. Three probe exercises were implemented: these were designed to playfully to open up potential re-articulations of, respectively, such core themes as energy, communities and futures. Our goals were to examine the extent to which such probes enabled semblamatic responses in relation to the core themes, and to explore whether the exercises facilitated participants' engagement with these themes as matters of potentiality. Findings were mixed. The retention of standard meanings of these core themes was certainly in evidence, showing that such events can be, despite the best intentions, anaesthetic, blunting people's affective access to the semblamatic aspects of engagement. Conversely, there were also instances of a novel opening up in which the core themes were creatively re-articulated, though this required a semblamatic reading of collective participant responses. The present perspective, with its three novel terms - semblamatic, matters of potentiality, and anaesthetic - might prove useful in alerting scholars to the complex role of aesthetics in the methodological and analytic practices entailed in engagement with publics.