Contentious interfaces

Abstract

This chapter takes a distinctive approach to the task of understanding relations between collective provision typically supplied by infrastructures and individual consumption commonly enabled by appliances. It does so by investigating a selection of critical and contentious junctions or interfaces at which multiple interests and actors meet. The sites on which we focus – one being the plugging in of electric vehicles, the other being the design and positioning of smart metering systems – provide different but complementary insights into the ongoing ‘making’ of roles and categories around which infrastructures are organised. In taking this approach we show that such distinctions are reflected and also reproduced in the design and operation of material objects and networks around which infrastructures are formed.