Jenny Rinkinen

Stacking wood and staying warm: Time, temporality and housework around domestic heating systems

This paper presents a study of the socio-technical ordering of time around wood-fuelled heating systems of detached houses. It analyses the sequences and rhythms that organize the work of domestic heating, its synchronization with other daily activities, and tempo as the subjective experience of time in these activities. The study is based on a large, pre-existing Finnish free-form diary collection. We suggest that domestic energy technologies become useable and useful through the gradual embedding that involves the temporal organization of everyday life. As a result, technologies that organize time are not only convenient in an invisible way but also act as taken-for-granted coordinates and rhythms of human pursuits in everyday life. In many countries, wood-fuelled heating systems remain a common renewable energy technology in detached houses and stand as one option to lower related carbon emissions. However, the broader use of wood is compromised by time and convenience.

Object relations in accounts of everyday life

Theories of social practice routinely acknowledge the significance of the material world, arguing that objects have a constitutive role in shaping and reproducing the practices of which daily life is made. Objects are also important for those who approach ‘everyday life’ as an ontology, a tradition in which scholarly interest in the material reaches beyond the somewhat pragmatic concerns of practice theory. In this article we identify traces of both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material environments. By drawing on an archive of diary material, we illustrate multi-faceted object relations with reference to the example of keeping warm. We conclude that in keeping warm, diarists weave together encounters, tactics and judgements, encountering objects in ways that extend beyond the ‘mere’ enactment of social practice. In analysing these encounters we explore ways of conceptualising the object-world that are especially relevant for studies of everyday life.

Moving home: houses, new occupants and the formation of heating practices

ABSTRACT This paper examines the formation of heating practices at the time of moving house. Interviews on occupant changes in Finnish single-family houses with a focus on heating arrangements and thermal comfort reveal that practice formation in and around occupant changes is a complex process of aligning elements where the house stands out as a coordinative and coordinated aggregate. As houses pass from one set of occupants to the next, they carry practices and delineate new ways of operation to the new occupants. The study demonstrates the temporal unfolding of the hidden complexity to what seems like a straightforward process of residents interacting with a new heating system and home. The findings contribute to the understanding of the domestic sphere as a space for practice formation.

Seeing Wood for the Trees: Placing Biological Processes Within Practices of Heating and Harvesting

This chapter aims to move towards a ‘biological’ understanding of materiality within theories of practice. Recognising that the biological and social are part of an intertwined process of becoming, the chapter argues for a turn from the ‘objectness’ of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. In reflecting upon such a turn, Rinkinen draws from the examples of wood management and small-scale wood-based space heating practices, to emphasise wood as a living organism and distinctive material element of practice. Recognising that practices not only demand resources, but interact with them in a constitutive manner, helps comprehend how practices are anchored in the material world.

Cold chains in Hanoi and Bangkok: Changing systems of provision and practice

We know that patterns of domestic consumption are situated within broader systems of provision and that home appliances like the fridge freezer bridge between practices of cooking, shopping and eating, on one hand, and increasingly global systems of food production, distribution and diet on the other. In analysing the uses of fridge freezers in Hanoi and Bangkok as expressions, in microcosm, of complex and evolving processes of urbanisation and food provisioning, this article provides new insight into how specific configurations, dependencies and patterns of consumption take hold and how they vary and change. Our analysis of systems and practices in flux has the dual function of showing how household strategies reflect and contribute to more extensive transformations, and of demonstrating how these are shaped by ongoing tensions and relations between new and established forms of urban food supply and associated concepts of freshness and safety. The result is a subtle account of the multiple routes through which consumer ‘needs’ evolve.

The rhythms of infrastructure

Technology organizes social life in different ways. This article focuses on the temporal ordering brought about by household energy technologies and the broader infrastructures upon which they depend. Such technology saves time, and the energy services so provided allow for comfort, flexibility and the independence from natural rhythms. While many such services are produced by distant infrastructures, the technology is neither invisible nor impermeable. On the contrary, our empirical results show that routinized human labour is needed to achieve comfort and convenience and to respond to the weather. Moreover, infrastructure failures, such as blackouts, create moments in which the rhythms of everyday life and the relationship between humans and technological systems are renegotiated. Surprisingly, the rhythms of heating work and those of sudden infrastructure failures are not only a source of inconvenience and trouble, but are also appreciated.