(Energy) Future-Making in and Through Test Beds

• In Event: Co-creating or Testing Scalable Societies? Test Beds and Living Labs as Emerging Innovation Policy Instruments - I

Abstract

Test beds represent an experimental approach to innovation policy and have gained prominence among policy-makers, business actors and researchers alike. Across sectors and disciplines, these actors expect TB to address pressing “real-world” challenges more adequate, participatory and faster through their particular experimental and situated approach. This presentation sheds light on the practices why and how visions of future societies are tested, contested and materialized in and through test beds as projects of science, technology and innovation. Point of departure is that TB as geographical sites of experimentation, observation and demonstration are co-produced by particular sociotechnical visions of future societies. That means TB do not simply test a technology under real-world conditions. Rather, they reconfigure and “test” society around a new set of technologies and associated modes of governance based on particular visions of the future – occasionally against considerable resistance and contestation. The presentation will trace the role of visions in technological development, their contestation between heterogeneous stakeholders, and processes of materialization and performativity. The empirical work draws on ethnography and qualitative interviews from two energy transition case studies – an urban innovation campus and a regional innovation network – conducted between 2013 and 2018. Exposing the ways in which material artefacts, collective practices and future visions become objects of experimentation sheds light on TB as terrains of power and their inherent political nature as governance instruments. With their particular approach on “future-making”, TB serve as a stark reminder that what is at stake in innovation is social order.

Authors

• Franziska Engels, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) / Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Sebastian Michael Pfotenhauer, Technical University Munich

• Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich