ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the kind of crafting with tangible materials towards designing future energy efficient products, systems and infrastructures. Design-as-a-process-of-inquiry involves making collaborative forms in order to bring to the surface unarticulated reflections-in-action, and to bring resonance between various participants within collaborative design processes into play. Three recurring opposing categorizations emerged from a process of co-analysis of the workshop documentation involving the dialogic product: users as being flexible vs. technology as being flexible, users as passive consumers vs. users as active co-creators, and educating users vs. learning from users. Instead, improvisation and realization that the conditions for inter-relationality and collaborative forms made will play different roles, at different places, at different times. The purpose of the research tool was to generate anthropological capacities of reflexivity in the company concerning assumptions and familiar modes of thought informing design practices of the Energy SMART grid.
