The lab will rethink how social reality is reproduced through everyday practices of measurement and ask how anthropology can contribute to the re-design of everyday life. 

The lab will ask, 'What is a meter?' What does it measure, and what does it ignore? How do meters configure you as a user and your actions as part of a social collective? How is their authority maintained? Is a meter merely a way to facilitate exchange of service for money, or is it a means to generate a calculative subject (von Schnitzler, 2008)? Do meters produce a kind of "space of calculability" (Callon & Caliskan, 2005) which invites residents to subject their daily consumption practices to a constant metrological scrutiny? How do meters mediate the relationship between state and citizen (Anand, 2015; Fennell, 2011; Min & Golden, 2013) or company and consumer (Coleman, 2014)? How much of the meter's utility is evident in its design, its placement, its representation and its products? And what are the implications of digital, smart or open-source meters that promise to give new kinds of agency to both people and things? 

Lab run together with Simone Abram (Durham University) and Hannah Knox (University College London)