Yolande Strengers

Designing eco-feedback systems for everyday life

Eco-feedback systems currently frame householders as micro-resource managers, who weigh up the costs and benefits of their consumption, and make autonomous, rational and efficient decisions. Reporting on findings from a qualitative study of three Australian energy and water eco-feedback programs utilising an in-home display (IHD) system, this paper challenges this view. The research finds that householders consume energy and water to carry out everyday practices, such as showering, laundering and cooling, which are mediated by social, cultural, technical and institutional dynamics. The paper proposes an alternative design paradigm for eco-feedback systems premised on the realities of everyday life and identifies several design directions that emerge from this new starting point.

Negotiating everyday life: The role of energy and water consumption feedback

Trials and evaluations of energy and water consumption feedback are premised on understandings of consumption as a rational and individual decision-making process. This article draws on two alternative conceptualizations of consumption to understand the role and effectiveness of consumption feedback delivered through an in-home display (IHD). The first considers how consumption is mediated by socio-technical systems of energy and water provision, and the second views it as part of social practices such as laundering, eating and heating. The article draws on these conceptualizations to analyse a qualitative dataset of interviews and tours with 28 Australian households participating in three separate IHD feedback programmes. The article finds that IHDs are an important visualization tool that illuminate otherwise invisible systems of energy and water provision. However, they have the potential to legitimize particular practices and to overlook those considered non-negotiable. The article concludes that IHDs can play a role in making socio-technical systems of energy and water provision more relevant to householders’ everyday lives, and in questioning and debating non-negotiable practices. This will necessitate repositioning and blurring the roles and responsibilities of resource providers and consumers. As a mediating device with the ability to extend both inside and outside the home, the IHD provides a unique platform for reorienting its role towards these ends.

Smart energy in everyday life: are you designing for resource man?

With the introduction of smart grids, meters, and associated technologies, electricity systems are going through an ICT transformation. The aim of this endeavor is similarly transformative: to decarbonize the electricity grid and reduce or shift peaks in electricity demand. Humble household energy consumers are set to play a key role in this transformation, where they, too, are being asked to become “smart.”

Smart metering demand management programs: challenging the comfort and cleanliness habitus of households

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieus concepts of habitus, field and capital, this paper outlines how smart metering demand management programs could be redesigned to bring together the competing fields of resource management and domestic life. Comfort and cleanliness expectations, which are ingrained in the habitus of householders and the field of domestic life, are often overlooked in demand management programs, which focus instead on making existing and evolving expectations more efficient. This paper draws on preliminary findings from qualitative research activities with householders who received consumption feedback through an in-home display, and/or variable price signals --- both enabled by smart meters. The paper offers insights for designers of interactive demand management strategies about how to go beyond achieving efficiency benefits in the home in order to fundamentally change expectations and norms ingrained in the habitus.

Introduction to the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI

Since Bleviss seminal paper [Blevis 2007] in 2007, environmental sustainability has established itself as a mainstream concern for HCI. After an initial flurry of excitement about the potential for existing HCI techniques, such as persuasive computing and interaction design, to contributemeaningfully to increasing sustainability, we have begun to recognize that the complexity and apparent intractability of working towards sustainability is providing serious challenges to current HCI ways of approaching problems. For example, some are working to deepen the engagement between HCI and established approaches of environmental psychology [Froehlich et al. 2010] and behavioral theory [Hekler et al. 2013] in order to develop more rigorous methods and theoretical connections for pursuing sustainability. Others are deploying and evaluating eco-feedback technologies at a scale not yet common in HCI [Erickson et al. 2013] to get a better sense of their effects and potentialities. Thus, sustainability is becoming not simply a problem that HCI can contribute to solving, but also an opportunity to understand the limits of HCI as it is currently constituted and to develop new possibilities for the discipline.

Beyond demand management: co-managing energy and water practices with Australian households

This paper highlights the problems and assumptions ingrained in dominant demand-management programmes designed to address issues of erratic household energy consumption, urban water shortages and increasing peak electricity demand. It begins by highlighting the problematic divide between energy and water production and the seemingly separate sphere of consumption. This divide fails to consider the ways in which consumption shapes, and is shaped by, resource production and provision. The paper argues that, by focusing on the individual consumption of resources, demand managers overlook the changing dynamics of everyday practices for which resources are consumed, such as bathing, laundering, heating and cooling. This is problematic because these practices are continuing to shift and change, often in more resource-consuming, expensive and environmentally damaging directions, potentially negating the resource savings achieved through demand-management programmes and policies. To address these oversights, this paper proposes an alternative resource management paradigm which brings together the conceptual strands of co-management and social practice theory. By shifting emphasis away from co-managing resources and onto co-managing day-to-day practices, a range of new opportunities for change emerge. The paper presents the concepts, methodologies and strategies central to this new paradigm and contrasts these with demand-management approaches. Avenues for change include focusing on the ‘intermediaries’ of demand (taps, showers, appliances, etc.), the material infrastructure of housing, co-operatively owned and/or managed resource systems, campaigns to instigate new cultural practices or collaborative partnerships established during some variable pricing programmes. However, the paper warns that making the transition towards this new paradigm requires urgent research and policy attention. It concludes by proposing a research agenda which aims to highlight both the complications in continuing to ignore the relationship between production and consumption, and the benefits of co-management approaches which attempt to bridge this divide.

Curious energy consumers: Humans and nonhumans in assemblages of household practice

In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household’s energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consumers. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with householders living in Sydney, Australia, and theories of practice, materiality and agency from sociology and science and technology studies, we seek to understand consumers as human and nonhuman actants operating in distributed assemblages of practice. We explore the implications of conceptualising non-traditional consumers of energy, such as babies, pets, pests and pool pumps, as performers of or materials in practices that consume energy. Our analysis provides new ways of potentially intervening in patterns of energy consumption. We argue that policy makers need to refocus their attention on finding routes into assemblages of practice to achieve change. We conclude by calling for further exploration and recognition of the myriad curious consumers found in households.

Meeting in the Global Workplace: Air Travel, Telepresence and the Body

Abstract In the highly connected and globalised corporate workplace, face-to-face communication is persisting and expanding, despite significant advances and investments in telecommunication. Drawing on interviews with 34 employees from an Australian company trying to reduce air travel associated with business meetings, this paper reveals how telepresence facilitates distinctly different practices of meeting and collaborating to those enabled by face-to-face encounters. The analysis draws attention to the essential role of the body in the practices of virtual and in-person business meetings. During in-person meetings the body’s physical presence conveys meanings of respect and value, provides sensorial competency and gestures, and enables physical mobility as it carries people between and within different material environments. The paper concludes by identifying some possibilities for telepresence meetings to replicate and replace in-person meetings as a normal and effective way of collaborating in the global workplace.

Interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration in doctoral candidature: tensions within and between discourses

Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the authors experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on candidates and their supervisors in interdisciplinary and industry collaborative environments in the humanities, arts and social sciences. The article questions the common assumption that ‘more (disciplines) is better’ to address complex social, economic and environmental problems. It highlights the ways in which interdisciplinary and industry-led projects can inadvertently silo the doctoral candidate and the problem to be ‘solved’ within dominant ontological, epistemological and political frameworks. The article calls on supervisors and candidates to adopt the role of negotiators and translators in complex research relationships. It concludes that in some cases, discipline-specific, independent research may provide the novel and innovative answers required to address ‘real-world’ problems.

Utilising Mixed Methods Research to Inform Low-carbon Social Housing Performance Policy

Abstract There is an over reliance on cost-benefit analysis in the policy development and evaluation of sustainable housing outcomes. This paper presents both qualitative and quantitative analyses from a multi-year mixed methods evaluation of four new low-carbon social houses in regional Victoria, Australia. Through a cost-benefit lens the housing was not financially viable. Householder interviews highlighted positive social outcomes such as improved health. A narrow focus by housing performance policy makers on cost-benefit analysis results in important understandings about housing and householders being overlooked or undervalued; inclusion of multiple evaluation methods can help to reflect a more realistic sustainable housing future.