ABSTRACT. The factors that contribute to the rise of energy deprivation in the home are gaining increasing attention among policy practitioners and academic scholars. Understood as a condition in which a household lacks a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in its residential dwelling (based on Buzar 2007), domestic energy deprivation has been persistently present – and has often been expanding – in developed and developing countries alike. In the global North, the broader dimensions of this predicament are encapsulated under the notion of ‘fuel poverty’, and are frequently the subject of remedial or preventative measures implemented by the state. It remains unclear, however, how processes of socio-technical transition affect the extent and depth of domestic energy deprivation. This is particularly true with respect to the low-carbon transitions currently underway across many developed countries, where the effects of price rises and infrastructural transformation on the extent and depth of fuel poverty have received rather limited policy and academic attention. There is a particular dearth of knowledge with respect to the role of state-led policies, actions and organizations in producing and mitigating fuel or energy poverty.

This paper uses an energy vulnerability framework (Middlemiss and Gillard 2015, Hall et al 2013) to explore the governance of domestic energy deprivation in the European context. When understood through a vulnerability lens, the lack of adequate energy services can be connected to broader institutional dynamics at a variety of scales. There is evidence to suggest that energy transitions increase the social vulnerability of actors involved in and affected by them, including entities operating at different scales, from individual households to entire states. I aim to contribute to the formulation of an explicitly spatial perspective on the energy vulnerability-transitions relationships, by extending the ‘multiple transitions’ (Sýkora and Bouzarovski 2011) framework to the energy context. The paper is based on an analysis of documentary evidence and 170 expert interviews undertaken between April 2013 and March 2015. This research took place in the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where systemic change has fundamentally altered the institutional landscape of the energy sector since the early 1990s. Its findings point to the need for understanding energy vulnerability as a socio-spatial formation embedded in multiple layers of institutional change and organizational practice, while identifying urban landscapes as the primary locale for the geographic expression of domestic energy deprivation.

ABSTRACT. To understand energy demand in transport and travel, this paper argues that we need to investigate the specific ways in which energy; economics, money and value are understood and deployed in everyday life. Transport modelling and planning rests on assumptions about the pre-determined nature and fixity of individual practices, which are often modelled as either the outcomes of rational choice (based, in particular, on the concept of homo economicus) or as individualised ‘habits’. Our findings, however, reveal that energy-consumption practices in relation to travel and transport are far more complex, based on temporally shifting relations between familiar individuals and relationships to ‘others’, as well as interactions with spaces and things.

Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal panel study on travel, transport and mobility, which is part of the larger multidisciplinary Step-Change project (http://www.changing-mobilities.org.uk), the paper develops empirical analysis on the relationship between travel and demand. Specifically, it explores the contingencies of everyday motilities as ‘vernacular economies’, where personal histories, household arrangements and cultures of place shape mobility choices and practices. Life history narratives collected from in-depth interviews with 245 participants in the panel from Leeds and Manchester in northern England are examined to reflect on and discuss the ways in which economic resources make available, or constrain, mobility. Respondents recounted how they stretch, waste, spend and save money; how they make complex calculations and comparisons of the costs of travel which are not always reducible to economic value.  We situate these discussions against the backdrop of austerity and cuts to public services, arguing that more nuanced and situated understandings of the relationships between money, value and energy use in relation to transportation is needed.

ABSTRACT. Great hopes are vested in electric vehicle uptake at a scale which will eventually overtake fossil fuelled vehicles.  The substantial questions of the plausibility of these ambitions are tied up with questions of what impacts could be expected if there was major expansion of electric vehicles.  Examination of some of these questions is occurring through a range of studies and forecasts. As with any investigation, these studies and forecasts involve theoretical assumptions and implicit and explicit priorities. Attention has tended to focus on understanding supply side development and provision of vehicles and infrastructure, and demand-side changes in relative costs of electric and conventional vehicles and vehicle fuel.  This paper analyses the assumptions and priorities contained in forecasts for electric vehicles    and asks whether they mean that potential scenarios, and impacts which could significantly affect the lives of some groups of people, go unconsidered.  We identify three broad areas of concern. First is that the demand side emphasis on economic factors, especially parity between the combined vehicle and fuel costs of electric and conventional vehicles, does not adequately take account of matters of affordability. That is, the assessments of costs of electric vehicles give to great a weight to considerations of whether overall costs of electric vehicles are economically worthwhile for people and households. There is little consideration of which households would be excluded, or face hardship, in covering the upfront costs of an electric vehicle.  Yet unless they can access an electric vehicle, relatively cheaper running costs are an unobtainable economic benefit.  Second, while some demand side study has considered implications of electric vehicles for domestic energy prices, these tend again to focus on impacts and overall costs for those using electric vehicles.  Third, and perhaps most significantly, there is a lack of consideration of whether a society increasingly organised around widespread use of electric vehicles, risks creating forms of exclusion for those without access. To illustrate the case for this type of consideration we describe prominent examples of technologies and economic benefits, which have become widespread but unevenly distributed, and which have led to new types of social exclusion.  Drawing on this analysis we develop recommendations for refining and expanding both the scope and priorities, importantly, the assumptions within forecasts on electric vehicles.  We recognise and explore the uncertainty surrounding any forecasts, but argue that we might just improve prospects for understanding distributional impacts if consideration is given to reassessing priorities and assumptions.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates how building designers deal with energy requirements during planning of a renovation project. The study takes a practice approach to investigating design processes and is based on ethnographical fieldwork conducted by the author. The study suggests that energy standards, such as the low-energy class 2015 outlined in the Danish building code, do not get adopted as they are, but the standards are stretched and pulled by the stakeholders to fit interests in the project. Furthermore, the study discusses the role of artefacts in an engineer’s attempt to enrol others in energy concerns.

ABSTRACT. Interactions between building standards, housing design and construction, and household demand management are critical for enabling sustainable energy transitions in the residential sector. Despite acknowledgement of these intersections, policy consistently fails to account for relations between these three practices. This oversight frequently results in below anticipated building energy performance outcomes and unintended consequences (e.g. householder dissatisfaction). Theories of social practice (SPT) highlight the need to move beyond siloed policy approaches, to accelerate transformations towards a less energy-intensive housing sector. However, isolated practices, single sites of performance, and a narrow selection of actors and agents remain the focus of much SPT research, limiting the ability to ‘scale-up’ theoretical insights, and meet policy calls for a reliable evidence-base.

Recognising the need to develop a systemic practice-based approach, and extending recent conceptualisations of networked practices, this paper incorporates two notions from the sociology of translation (SoT) – problematisation and (de)enrolment – to analyse the UK Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) construction standard as a low-energy intervention in a whole system of housing practice. Studying a series of problematisations, emergent over a period of ten years, that variously enrolled/de-enrolled practices into/from a networked system of housing practice in Norfolk, UK enables contextual evaluation of CSH implementation. A multi-dimensional model of systems of practice and typology of practice relations are then presented. The paper concludes by highlighting implications of the proposed framework for addressing societal challenges both within, and beyond, the housing sector.

ABSTRACT. This paper is about the making of demand in the development process of district-heating networks, which are sociotechnical systems designed to supply heat to buildings, especially in high-density urban environments. Thanks to their efficiency, their capacity to exploit local energy sources and the adaptability of their energy mix, district-heating solutions are nowadays amongst the preferred options for the provision of heat when planning and developing eco-districts in Europe (Gabillet 2015).
As for many infrastructural projects, estimating future consumption is an important issue for the development of heating networks. In fact, both the magnitude and the distribution of future energy demand are key parameters to choose the most appropriate energy systems to deploy in new districts, and then to design and implement them (Guy and Karvonen 2015). Heating demand assessments, however, are fraught with uncertainty: little is known about actual thermal performance of buildings, user behaviours are far from being understood, and knowledge is even weaker when it comes to the evolution of energy demand in the next decades.
In this context, methods for estimating future consumption are crucial.  Yet, in French district heating projects, the numerous demand assessments that are produced at various stages of the design process comply with divergent, black-boxed calculation standards! For example, energy assistants to urban planning & development authorities, suppliers of district heating and design offices specialized in fluids integration into buildings are three different types of actors involved in district-heating projects; each of them uses a standardized method to calculate demand, but these various standards produce divergent estimates of future consumption.
Drawing on an extensive empirical work on energy design in urban development projects, this paper therefore explores the following questions: What does explain both the diversity and the divergence of calculation standards for future heating demand? What are the consequences of this dissonance between standards for district-heating systems and projects? Why do these standards remain unquestioned except for a few restricted arenas?
By doing so, our study first provides empirical data about the use of standards in making energy demand from a supply-side perspective, thus bringing out the controversial nature and the performative power of these standards (Akerman and Peltola 2006) and questioning their role in arenas of development linked to urban energy infrastructures (Jorgensen and Sorensen 1999). Mobilizing standards as revealers of sociotechnical processes involved in the making of demand, we also (partly) unveil the sociotechnical networks and decision-making chains into which district heating systems are inscribed, thereby providing new insights on the organisation and governance of urban energy systems (Summerton 1992; Hawkey et al. 2013).

ABSTRACT. Improving the environmental performance of buildings, particularly in the non-domestic sector, is a ‘wicked’ problem, lacking a simplistic or straightforward response. This is particularly challenging where space is leased, in part because the relationships between the various owners, users and managers of the space is regulated – at least in a formal sense - through the lease.  Traditional leases largely ignore environmental considerations and present barriers to making energy efficient upgrades. This exploratory paper investigates how office and retail leasing practices are evolving to become ‘greener’ in the UK and Australia, providing evidence from a UK study of office and retail leases, a UK project exploring energy management in the retail sector, a case study of a major UK retailer (Marks & Spencer (M&S)), a Sydney Better Buildings Partnership (BBP) office study, and evidence on the development of green leases in the Australian retail sector. The analysis suggests an increasing trend towards green leases in some of these markets, but not others.  Green leases are conceptualised as a form of ‘middle-out’ inter-organisational environmental governance that operates sideways between organisations, alongside the more commonly addressed external and internal drivers that shape organisational practices.  Further research is needed to understand the practical impact that greener leasing has on environmental performance of buildings. Additionally our research provides insights into the profession of law, particularly property lawyers and how they are trained to “de-risk” leases, which works against adding new, non-standard clauses.

ABSTRACT. There are growing calls for more empirical research on professional, as opposed to ordinary everyday, practices. At the same time, there are also an increasing number of calls for more research that addresses the interconnections between practices. It is through drawing on such calls and literatures that this paper aims to investigate the social organisation of network management, which represents a (new) profession that exists so as to intervene in the organisation of other professional practices. In exploring this, we draw on five in-depth semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in managing networks in varying ways and to varying extents. We found that key actors exist in defining a network’s need, which alongside numerous expectations and knowledges, shape the strategic direction of network management. It was also clear that internet infrastructures play a central part of the ongoing reproduction of network management, and thus forms a central component to how it may evolve in the future. Lastly, we suggest that future trajectories of network management may include a growing set of more topic-specialist (rather than generalist) knowledges, as part of developing networks that fill unresolved niches. We conclude by drawing out the energy demand implications of how network management is organised, as well as by reflecting upon lessons for the running of the newly launched Energy in Water European Strategic Cluster Partnership (ESCP). Indeed this ESCP is a common point of reference throughout the paper itself.

ABSTRACT. During the replacement and installation of domestic central heating systems, heating installers contribute to the selection of heating technologies, physically position these devices and act as an informant to householders. Indeed, these actors have been identified for their role in shaping users’ understandings and use of the central heating products installed in their homes. Despite this, heating installation practices have not yet been subject to detailed academic enquiry. This paper presents the findings of an in-depth ethnographic exploration into how installation is a meeting point for professional and domestic practices. In particular, this paper uses the concept of scripting, which suggests that the assumptions made about users during the design of technologies can shape their eventual use. With this frame, it explores how, through using their own ideas of customers in the selection and explanation of central heating controls, heating installers can contribute to end users’ understandings and use of their central heating systems.

ABSTRACT. The heating and cooling of private houses stands for a significant share of energy demand. In parallel, new solutions are being rapidly introduced. One key aspect of new technology is the emergence of markets. The worth of, for example, energy efficiency depends on the market institutions which facilitate transactions and frame particular properties as recognizable, reliable and desirable. Econometric evidence is inconclusive on how (well) the real estate markets work in respect to energy efficiency. It suggests that energy efficiency labels, investments and performance are capitalized in the markets of private housing. Nevertheless, results vary by situation, technology, social groups and by country. We suggest that sociological approaches can explain some of the contradictory results of the valuation of energy solutions in the markets. Market sociologists have studied a broad range of product categories such as future derivatives, foodstuff at supermarket, high quality wines and contemporary art. Yet, it seems that the exchanges of private detached houses of highly varying age and other quality attributes contributes novel problems. Moreover, the role of real estate agents appears problematic as they are embedded both in various principle-agent relations and yet at the same time aim to function and neutral arbitrators of debates over quality and proper price of the complex merchandise. The empirical focus of the paper is on market exchanges of single family houses in Finland. By far, the majority of studies of adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions presume that household acquire them anew and operate them for their useful lifetime. This is however not the case in the Finnish market. Close to equal number of H/C systems are sold as integrated into houses in the secondary market than as new installations. Yet, pricing mechanisms and value attribution are very different in the market of primary industrial products and installed, second hand equipment. Moreover, energy related aspects appear in a different light for a seller/buyer at the market than for a long-term occupant. Drawing on interviews with Finnish real estate agents (17) and households (15), we thus set the following questions: 1) What kind of actor constellations and expertise are involved in the transactions on the market of detached houses? 2) How is energy efficiency of buildings and HVAC -systems objectified and made marketable? 3) What is the role of real estate agents in making energy efficiency feature in market transactions?

ABSTRACT. We are interested in understanding the meanings of “flexibility” when households and small enterprises are considered as “energy consumers”. Quotation marks indicate that these terms are defined in a specific way, within some specialised fields – mainly engineering and the art of designing markets. Flexibility is nevertheless an important issue as renewables are transforming the notions of offer and demand: electricity production is variable and not easily stored. Which practices are negotiable and shiftable? How are practices dependent on specific assemblages of humans and nonhumans? The way we translate the foreign language into some common idiom of social sciences is extremely important. This paper aims at exploring the issue in focussing on the following notions: practices, electrical signatures, assemblages, typologies and rhythm.
In a previous research, we have established a typology of heat pump users based in looking at what people do, how they appropriate their devices, how they manage their “comfort” and how their practices are related to humans and nonhumans. Although based on human segmentation, our typology proved to capture some bits of assemblages that include nonhuman entities. For instance, we have found that “environmentalists” consume less electricity by 50% than “economists”. This is mainly explained by the size of the houses and floor heating surfaces, but also by the way expectations build literally habitations and daily actions. This case shows that it is possible to relate assemblages of infrastructures and practices to volumes of electricity consumption. The level of consumption is however a very rough electrical signature. Analysing the “shiftability” of practices requires more detailed electrical signature.
We consider the electric signal as the interface between a household (or small enterprise) and the grid. Translating language from the grid to users and conversely implies to combine quantitative and qualitative data. Electricity comes into quantities and is practiced in qualities. In our new research, starting in 2016, we will use electricity disaggregator in 50 buildings. The paper will present our theoretical and methodological orientations. Through two series of interviews, we will aim at relating electrical signals to practices. To make sense of the variety of observed cases, we will try to develop a typology based on assemblages that would be articulated to possible changes of the electrical signature of practices. These assemblages will be centred on practices and related bodies and machines. We assume that practices emerge from assemblages and that rhythms are identified through the reproduction of practices.

ABSTRACT. Aggregate electricity demand follows the same pattern every day. Peaks in demand are experienced during both morning and evening. The time dependence of social practices at specific points in time leads to peaks in system demand. This work aims to assess how time dependence in social practices relates to peak residential electricity demand. The issue of (mutual) dependence between social practices and time has been debated for some time at a conceptual level, but seldom been operationalised into empirical research. The idea will be to present preliminary results from the analysis of the new 2014 ONS National Time Use Survey. The analysis will make use of logistic regression for six social practice: preparing food, washing, cleaning, washing clothes, watching TV and using a computer. The focus will be on social practices over temporal scales of different days of the week and months of the year. The analysis will be based on the number of minutes spent on an activity during peak hours, for the months of February and June. Findings will test the hypothesis that (i) time dependence is higher at peak time and (ii) that washing and cleaning are the least dependent practices in time, thus making them less time-dependent and, possibly, more flexible to changing practices away from peak electricity demand. Findings will have implications on the way energy demand research thinks about flexibility and intervention: the more practices are time-dependant, the less shiftable in time is peak energy demand (through price and technology).

ABSTRACT. National time-use surveys provide detailed data of people’s activities over a 24-hour period and in numerous ways have proven to be useful sources of information for energy demand research. Crucially, such data is used by both engineers and social scientists in energy demand research, and as such it can serve as a useful interdisciplinary ‘bridge’ within this field of research. This paper presents a novel method for the visualisation and analysis of time-use activity data which is critically distinguished from conventional methods by explicitly representing how activities are dynamically interconnected in time. The method uses network theory as a formal framework for diagramming sequences of activities to create dynamic network graphs. The method provides insight by visually revealing how activities can be classified into a range of different types depending on their position and role within the overall activity network. The network metrics of degree and centrality are used to identify personal care (e.g. eating, washing and dressing), household and family care, and travel as the categories of activities with the highest degree and centrality, suggesting that they act as ‘anchors’ and ‘hubs’ within the overall activity network. These types of metrics are used when assessing other types of networks such as information or technical networks and can be useful for identifying what make them flexible or resilient to change. This work provides an initial step towards the goal of providing similarly beneficial analysis of activities, with the view of informing research into what makes people’s activities, and by extension their energy demand, flexible or resilient to change.

ABSTRACT. Policy promoting energy efficiency in households or to shift demand out of peak hours must relate to and rely on individuals’ daily choices and household routines, i.e. what they do in their everyday lives. As a consequence, the development of policy means targeting households’ energy consumption requires an understanding of energy consumption in relation to households’ activity patterns. Energy is an important resource used for the manifold of activities that form peoples’ everyday rhythm and to support improved energy efficiency in households, it is necessary to start with understanding this rhythm of people’s everyday life in terms of timing, duration and sequence of the activities performed by the household members.

In our contribution we will take interest in the households’ role and function in the energy system and especially in relation to the smart grid. Part of the smart grid discourse is the idea that the smart grid can assist energy companies and households in peak shaving i.e. in moving the consumption to outside peak hours.

We take this smart grid vision and relate it to peoples’ activity patterns in daily life and show how the electricity consumption is a result of their activity pattern. We will use a time-geographic visualization together with interview data to deepen the discussions of the consequences of everyday household doings for energy consumption and the smart grid. From household members’ time diaries in Sweden, we will analyze where, when, and for how long time periods which energy-related activities occur in the activity sequences of the household members, including who among the household members are engaged in what activities and in what wider social context the activities are performed.

We will discuss how flexible or inflexible different activities are in terms of altering the order in the activity sequence and analyze which implication moveable or unmovable activities have for e.g. peak shaving. Earlier we have shown that it is important to distinguish between household – as composed of more than one individual – and the individual, when policy advice is developed. (Ellegård & Palm 2015) This is of special interest when peak shaving is discussed since it relates to who is in control of doing or not doing an activity that claims electric appliances for its performance.

By utilizing many time diaries from a population we can also discover differences in activity patterns in larger groups, for example between generations, men and women, people in and outside the labor force, single households and families, adults and children. We visualize activity patterns in households during a period and, through that, discuss and problematize consequences for energy consumption and energy demand.

ABSTRACT. Changes in energy-related practices depend on the integration and circulation of constitutive elements such as conventions of comfort, standardised products, and mediated images of wellbeing. Even though studies have addressed this, the global convergence of elements and practices has not been subject to detailed attention.

In this paper we explore the proposition that elements of practice ‘circulate’ in systematically different ways and that the processes involved are relevant for the persistence and emergence of local differences in energy demand. We conceptualise crucial processes of international circulation and convergence, and the localised reproduction of energy-related practices. To understand the geographically uneven circulation of elements (and practices), we integrate concepts from political ecology and practice theory. Whereas practice theory has been powerful in conceptualising the diffusion of energy-related practices across scales, political ecology focuses on human-environment interactions and power relations across scales using neo-Marxist approaches in combination with discourse analysis. Bringing these together contributes to a strong account on how seemingly innocent aspects of home energy use are shaped by the global circulation of technologies and ideas, influenced by multinational companies, governments, multilateral banks, and others.

Drawing from our empirical work in Thailand and Vietnam we identify and account for points of intersection between practices and global circulation of elements relating to comfort, lighting and refrigeration. In the Global South, primary energy demand is rising rapidly, leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions, local social and environmental impact, and (geo-political) conflicts. As energy demand in the Global North is slowing or sometimes even falling, the result is a seemingly converging trend. This study contributes to theory development at the intersection of energy demand, practices and socio-economic development. It advances the understanding of international trends in energy demand and will help identify opportunities for national and international business and policy to reduce end use energy demand.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops a method for understanding the co-evolution of urban development and technological transitions drawing on examples from the city of Hong Kong. Socio-technical artefacts can be studied as a compendium of backward linkages (related to how the artefact is conceived, made and taken to a particular location of use) and forward linkages (related to how the artefact is actually used, reconceived and eventually discarded). This methodology can be applied at different scales, from examining a specific artefact to rethinking the trajectory of a particular technology in a given city.

ABSTRACT. It is difficult to find dissent from the proposition that it is desirable to reduce the energy required to keep buildings warm. However, translating this proposition into material investment in retrofitting existing buildings and raising minimum standards for new buildings is challenging given both the range of social interests impacted by implementation (building owners, occupants, utility companies, future generations, developers, etc.) and the fact that the financial benefits of energy saving are predicated on a counterfactual analysis and accrue over many years. Regulation of the energy performance of buildings, both newly constructed and renovated, is thus an area with much scope for contestation. In an attempt to establish a common approach, the European Commission (as part of the 2010 recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive) required member states to calculate “cost optimal” building standards, meaning the standards for which the combined (discounted) costs of energy efficiency measures and resulting energy demand over a thirty year period would be minimised. As costs of measures and energy vary across states, as do climatic conditions and the characteristics of the building stock, the Commission’s methodology allowed that the “cost optimal” standard would be different in different states. In this paper I discuss the reports submitted by three states (the UK, Denmark and Germany) to the Commission, and argue that, far from the methodology establishing a common baseline it afforded considerable flexibility for states to present quite different analyses. To the extent these analyses justified building standards already in place they reflect the (temporarily settled) outcome of negotiation among various interests, but in their selection of appropriate calculative techniques they also illustrate broader energy policy paradigms in each country. In particular I argue that the meaning (and not just the parameters) of “cost optimality” in the three countries is linked to dominant policy visions of the role of markets in determining outcomes and the range of supply-side futures entertained by policymakers.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we examine the influence of what we call market standards on design. We do this using the case of the design of commercial offices and the effects of standards on moves towards less energy demanding designs. Theoretically the paper builds on concepts drawn from a range of literatures examining standards, including science and technology studies and the sociology of standards. We argue that standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. We show that in the case of commercial offices this affect the likelihood of the incorporation of low energy technologies. Our analysis reveals: the importance of taking greater account of normative and cultural forms of market standards and their role in design; the value of explaining how standards break the relationship between design and social practice, in our case this meaning that low energy technologies that might adequately cater for office work much of the time are considered inappropriate due to a lack of understanding of office work practices; how standards interlock to legitimate incumbent (higher energy) technologies, and in turn de-legitimise (lower energy) alternatives, through the way they define what is ‘needed’; the value of tactics within energy and sustainability policies designed to govern non-regulatory standards and their effects. The paper thus makes an important contribution to understanding the ‘work’ of standards, and more broadly the production of energy demand in offices

ABSTRACT. At the global level, the building sector is a considerable energy user. Stricter building regulations and instruments such as energy performance standards aim at raising the energy performance ambitions of buildings, and at reducing their energy use. Such strategies may for example rely on the implementation and use of efficient technologies. However, technical efficiency does not guarantee low energy consumption when the building is used. Thus, a gap between the estimated and actual energy performance of buildings represents a common challenge. This gap is frequently referred to as the energy performance gap.
Over the lifecycle of a building, multiple professionals influence the resulting energy performance levels, and the opportunities for the ambitions to be achieved. This includes engineers, architects, construction workers and installers. This article concentrates on how building managers and occupants contribute to the energy performance gap and represent opportunities for reducing it. It takes professional practices, the standards by which they are guided and the relationships between them as a starting point for exploring the opportunities for achieving and sustaining the energy performance ambitions of non-residential buildings. It does that drawing on case studies mapping energy management and use practices in Norwegian non-residential buildings. The cases represent office buildings and schools with high energy performance ambitions. Methodologically, interviews have in each building been conducted with the building owner, facility managers and building user representatives. This article presents and compares the results from two of the office buildings studied. It demonstrates and discusses how the characteristics of and the relationships between professional practices and standards may help and hinder the realisation of ambitions and contribute to the energy performance gap. In conclusion, it points out opportunities for the development of interventions to influence energy use practices.

ABSTRACT. Over the past century, the energy efficiency of domestic heat supply has improved considerably. However, in parallel, demand for space heating has also increased, thus offsetting efficiency gains. To gain insight into the dynamics of changing levels of demand for domestic heating, we used a case study that explored relations between changes in the professional practices of planning and designing council houses in the UK, and the dynamics of demand for domestic space heating in tenant’s lives. We focused on a series of estates built in Stocksbridge, a town in South Yorkshire, UK the period between 1920 and 1970, which formed the high days of the council housing scheme. The case study entailed local archival research, analysis of national policy documents and oral history interviews. From this data, we argue that increases in demand for domestic space heating can usefully be understood as the integration of space heating into an increasing number of practices, and the spread of such practices over domestic space and time.
In the paper, we investigate relations between the various realms of practice involved in the scheme. This is not a story of professional practices scripting everyday life. Rather, what emerges is a recursiveness of relations between changes to the norms, expectations and routines of everyday life and the changing plans and standards of council house policy, planning and design.
After discussing increases in demand for domestic space heating in terms of these dynamics from the historical data, we close with reflections on what constructive lessons we can draw for Local Authorities as they respond to statutory expectations to make a difference to domestic energy demand. Although relations between domestic practices and the jurisdictions of local authorities have changed strongly since the 1970s, the paper draws out two insights from the historic case study that have relevance for contemporary energy policy of local authorities. One is the core role of non-energy policy in affecting changes in patterns of heating energy demand. The second is the conceptualisation of ‘energy interventions’ by local authorities as situated in a complex and iterative interplay between local authorities, national authorities and patterns of everyday practice.

ABSTRACT. My contribution will be on how built environment professionals integrate energy efficiency into the renovation processes of multi-family dwellings. Energy use in buildings in Sweden and EU represents 40% of the total energy use. A major challenge is thereby the existing building stock regarding energy efficiency since the new building rate is relatively low. Thus, renovation plays a crucial role for reduced energy consumption now and in coming years. But how, when and why some energy efficient measures are included or not in a renovation project is very much decided by professionals during the renovation process. These decision making processes are in focus for my research. How and why are certain energy efficiency measures promoted or rejected?
I have followed three renovation projects in a municipality-owned housing company in a middle-sized Swedish town. This housing company has set the goal to reduce the amount of purchased energy by 25% to 2025 (compared with 2011 figures). For the three renovation projects I followed there are also an explicit goal for improved energy efficiency. The focus has been on the planning and design phase of the renovation process since it is in this phase measures to be implemented are determined and decided upon.
I conducted 25 participant observations of planning and design meetings, further I interviewed all involved building professionals. This included members of the housing company as well as external consultants such as architects, construction engineers, HVAC or El consultants. The three renovation objects come from the post-war period and were built between the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Conclusions are that the planning process is structured with pre-defined agendas that makes the process efficient but not flexible. Innovations and alternative or creative ways of thinking have a difficulty to access the process, thus the planning process is not designed for brainstorming and new solutions. The building professionals usually selected measures for the renovation as well as energy efficiency measures that they have used before. Energy calculations and statistics attracted little interest and had little impact on the process for the building professionals. Experience (rule of thumb) and tacit knowledge is valued more important i.e. measures or solutions tried in a previous project, were valued much more than figures and statistics. There is also no common objective in the planning and design phase for the involved professionals. All this leads to a renovation process where energy does not enter the process.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes that current demand management strategies emerge from the routine managerial practices involved in translating and implementing policy objectives. Despite being flagged as significant (e.g.(Strengers, 2012), these managerial practices have received little empirical attention. However, the continued reliance on “narrow conceptual resources” (Shove, 2014)  is reducing the capacity for industries’ to deliver on policy objectives such as sustainability and resilience. This paper presents data from a mixed-method investigation of water efficiency in the English water sector, as a specific manifestation of demand management, and applies conceptual devices from a range of theories of practice to expound demand management practices.

The findings reveal the situational, social and technological contingency of management practices and demonstrate how, through these contextual features, specific managerial processes and outcomes are prioritized at the expense of potentially valuable alternatives. In particular efficiency becomes preferential over transformative management actions that may stand to reconfigure supply demand systems; discrete, quantifiable activities that fit within existing frameworks for evidence and appraisal over those that may provide systemic and integrated approaches to resource management challenges; and rapid, reactive solutions rather than adaptive management agendas.

Ultimately, these findings identify a range of potential avenues through which may enhance support for alternative demand management practices, with implications for the achievement of sustainability and resilience. For example the paper highlights 1) a need to realign core industry values and business structures to better reflect interdependencies, and to recognise how industry reforms have unintended consequences for the scope and definition of demand management; 2) the need for inclusive managerial communities with platforms for creative design processes and critically reflexive systems to facilitate development and diffusion of alternative management practices; 3) a need for more sophisticated systems of evidence and accounting that better incorporate complexity and facilitate management thereof including recognition of the interactions between complex demand and supply systems.

The paper focusses on the water efficiency agenda, however there are transferable understandings and the presentation will seek to draw out, and elicit discussion of, the overlaps and contributions of this research to the energy demand theme of this conference.

ABSTRACT. Some progressive planning interventions are characterized by actively seeking to reconfigure bundles of practices. This represents a different strategy for creating momentum (for energy efficient) change compared to prevailing interventions with emphasis on regulation and information. In this paper, we combine theoretical understandings of practices and translations as a means to illustrate that certain engagements with strategic work aimed at reconfiguring bundles of practices enables a different approach to establishing momentum for change through planning interventions. We illustrate, through an eclectic storytelling, how the strategic work of these progressive planners involves: 1) acknowledging the need for reconfiguring bundles of practices, 2) basing new practice arrangements on the identification of hidden potentials in prevailing practice architectures, and 3) actively enrolling different practitioners in these new practice arrangements. Based on this storytelling, we discuss why this, somewhat eclectic kind of theoretical interpretation of new forms of planning interventions, are important to perform in order to bridge the gap between theoretical insight and practitioners’ performance.

ABSTRACT. This presentation investigates energy demand at greenfield music festivals. As temporary and seasonal events greenfield music festivals fall outside the auspices of everyday routines. The temporariness of such festivals influences the temporal and spatial features of the events, differentiating them from events that are part of everyday routines. Music festivals are a particularly interesting case because of the temporal (multiday) and spatial (pastoral) features of the festivals which necessitate the reproduction of many features of everyday life. The literature on greenfield music festivals fails to capture the multiple ways in which energy is demanded at these events and the multiple ways this demand is provided for in the light of the spatial characteristics of the festivals. A different framework is required though which to understand this, along with the relationship between temporary events and everyday routine energy demand during the festival. Conceptualising events, such as greenfield music festivals, as bundles of social practices helps to capture this multiplicity by acknowledging that energy is used in the performance of social practices and not for its own sake (Shove and Walker 2014). It also provides a means of organising the multiple social practices that constitute events. These practices extend in time and space beyond the festival site and weekend. The aggregate timespaces (c.f. Schatzki 2010) of these practices can be thought of as the timespace of the event. Thinking about practices in this way captures the energy demands both of practices that are performed away from the festival site and weekend and those that are performed on-site during the festival weekend. These may include practices associated with organising, constructing and deconstructing event infrastructure, and the clean up operation, as well as those practices that take place on the festival site and weekend. Using this framework, this chapter takes an empirical look at the different ways in which the temporal and spatial characteristics of these temporary events influences energy demand and how this demand is satisfied given the temporal and spatial constraints and enablements of the festivals.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I consider what the insights of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis can bring to our understanding of the intertwining of the natural and the social in the constitution and temporalities of energy demand.  Whilst energy is as an ingredient of social practice and the material infrastructures and technologies through which energy is used are undoubtedly socially made, the rhythmic patterning of the social everyday is entwined with both corporeal and cosmological rhythms that have their foundation in nature, its beats, cycles and repetitions. Time, space and energy are the essential triadic, Lefebvre argues, an argument built on an understanding of rhythm which moves between the energy of energy systems, the energy of bodily entities and the energetic rhythms of cosmological cycles.  This perspective I argue brings natural processes into the making of energy demand in multiple ways, including both through the everyday patterning of social practice and through the working of commonplace technological devices that regulate energy flows.

ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to frame or describe the patterns of change that take place when householders act to reduce their energy demand (for example, through adaptations in the performance of everyday practices, purchasing of energy efficient products and broader infrastructural innovations). The mainstream policy approach – predicated on behavioural insights – tends to conceptualise this form of change as a series of relatively straightforward events that are separate from everyday life. Evidence from Smart Communities – a community action project – challenges these mainstream conceptions, but both supports and extends recent sociological insights. In particular, this research suggests that householders’ efforts might be better framed as hard work, a complex and time-consuming process that unfolds over lengthy periods of time. Energy demand reduction is time-consuming hard work because it often requires research, experimentation, negotiation and planning; this is the case, we argue, even for many ostensibly straightforward changes. Reducing energy demand should be understood as a process that unfolds over lengthy periods of time for four main reasons. First, as discussed, it is time-consuming hard work. Second, some changes can only take place ‘when the time is right’: when work is done on the house, when something needs replacing or when the cost becomes affordable. Third, work to reduce energy demand is easily squeezed out by the more pressing priorities of everyday life. Finally, change is easily halted or reversed as everyday life changes in other ways. In our discussion, we comment on: the relationships between behavioural and sociological approaches, the case for continued focus on action by householders and suggestions for practical action.

ABSTRACT. Understanding the patterning of energy demand at different scales and temporalities is essential for comprehending dynamics in social practices. An important but under researched scale of analysis is that of biographical time. In Ireland and beyond, momentous change in socio-cultural and techno-material landscapes have radically transformed the way everyday life is experienced and performed over the lifecourse, with major implications for how energy is demanded in the household. However, to date our understanding of how and why patterns of domestic energy demand change over biographical time within the context of wider changes in society remain poorly understood.

Recent research has shown how consumption of energy is an outcome of peoples’ participation in social practices such as shopping, eating, getting to school or work and fulfilling social roles, such as parenting. Significantly, social practice approaches highlight the dynamic and every changing nature of everyday practices and their role in social reproduction and transformation over time, suggesting that to understand social change requires understanding the careers of practices themselves. Shove et al. (2012: 39) stress the importance of individual and collective ‘careers’ of engagement with practice for patterning of energy demand over time, reminding us that ‘that the lives of practitioners and practices interact’ in the dynamics of practice as it plays out over time and space. To date, however, there has been little exploration of individuals’ biographic careers of practice despite the importance of lifecourse experience and circumstance for shaping patterns of engagement with and performance of practice over time (cf. Shove and Pantzar, 2007, Spurling, 2010).

This research focuses on addressing this gap in understanding of the dynamics of domestic energy demand. In doing so, it seeks to address the challenge of researching multiple scales and temporalities in the evolution of domestic practice in the in the context of individual careers and wider societal change. To this end, a biographic, practice-oriented methodology has been developed to explore how patterns of energy demand shift and evolve in the domestic sphere in the context of intersections between everyday practice, individual careers and wider societal and institutional transformations (cf. Spurling, 2010). Biographic explorations of careers of domestic practice at the  level of daily and life paths (cf. Pred, 1981a, 1981b), with people born in different generational cohorts in Ireland, in the domains of food, mobility and laundry is revealing dynamics of reproduction and transformation in patterns of everyday practice in terms of how and why energy is used. This paper first presents and discusses the temporally oriented theoretical and methodological framework underpinning this study. Following this, empirical findings highlighting dynamics of continuity and change in terms of how practices are conceptualised, co-ordinated, shared and performed over biographical time in domestic contexts are presented.

ABSTRACT. Pop-up food vending is a distinctive retail practice, which can be defined in terms of its temporal and spatially mobile nature, a unique business model and special skills and competencies that make it a transient activity. As the public domain is now seen as a food space eating on the street or buying from hawkers and especially pop up cafes and food trucks is no longer seen as inappropriate in Western cities. The paper below takes into account the different elements of pop-up practice and frames the discussion around how the temporal and spatial mobility of practices can achieve different results for sustainability and energy demand in different spaces. This paper draws from a qualitative study that has yielded information about students’ practices in and around the RMIT University’s city campus, their relationship with the food provisioning and consumption spaces at the campus and other practices that intersect with them.
Using Schatzki’s (2002) site ontology, this paper conceptualises spaces as sites of social action and therefore made up of practices. Therefore, this study of pop up practices and the ‘third place’ that they open up also includes other practices and arrangements that intersect with them temporally and spatially like students’ eating practices, University policies and urban sustainability in order to understand energy demand. This paper argues that the pop-up practice negotiates and helps open up spaces through their spatial and temporal flexibility and through innovating and bending the social norms that govern mainstream food provisioning and consumption. Moreover, the pop-up practice interacts with other practices and arrangements in these spaces and the spaces that the practice becomes a part of and shapes energy demand. This gives a point of intervention for affecting and reducing energy demand.

ABSTRACT. The Scottish Government has a problem. Achieving its ambitious carbon reduction targets will require significant transformation not only of energy and transport infrastructure but also of individuals’ and organisations’ choices, actions and attitudes. But the Scottish Government’s own and others’ research suggests that individualist, psychologically based ‘behaviour change’ is relatively ineffective, seldom transformational and unlikely to provide the scale of change required. A more sociological approach would seek to influence social practices rather than individual behaviours, but practices are themselves shaped, influenced and constrained by a wide range of historical, technological, material and social factors making change difficult to achieve. Viewing practices through a complexity theory lens and so seeking to influence not the practices but the complex social system of which they are a product may therefore be a helpful approach.
This paper reports on a project aiming to understand and steer energy demand relating to travel to cultural venues. These form a valuable site of investigation because they are directly responsible for relatively low carbon emissions but, along with other centres of transport such as sports grounds, conference centres and universities, cause significant travel-related carbon emissions by their audiences and suppliers. They also have regular attenders with a values-based loyalty, with whom they deliberately cultivate relationships and communicate regularly. They often have formal and informal links with influencing bodies such as local authorities and many are important social institutions. They therefore offer an opportunity to influence the wider complex social system.
This PhD therefore seeks to understand and influence the complex social system that influences travel practices of audiences attending His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen, a large and socially important venue in a city with a relatively definable catchment area, high car use and poor evening public transport services. The paper outlines the theoretical approach and the exploration and mapping of the complex social system and how it affects travel practices. It describes the practical project, working with the theatre, Aberdeenshire Council and Stagecoach to provide dedicated buses to specific destinations shortly after selected performances and introduce real-time service bus information within the theatre. It concludes with the initial results of surveys, focus groups and interviews aimed at ascertaining whether the complex social system has been affected by these interventions and, if so, how this might influence travel practices.

Ben Twist has directed over 80 theatre productions and researches part-time for a PhD whilst running Creative Carbon Scotland, a charity harnessing the influence of arts organisations to shape a sustainable Scotland.

ABSTRACT. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops connect users to the Internet, social media, and locative media while on the move: the operation of these networked portable computers harness always-on wireless, digital connectivity and are powered by batteries in need of constant charging. Checking email, finding directions through a mapping application are all common elements of personal mobility, but this digital overlay to mobility cannot be separated from its underlying energy demands. Supporting this constant, ubiquitous digital communication is both the digital infrastructure of wireless, ethereal connectivity but also the wired, global telecommunications systems that contain and transport the bits and bytes of information composing the Internet itself. Both of these infrastructures also require not-insignificant amounts of electrical energy. Conceptualizing contemporary mobility and mobile connectivity together begins by considering the energy demands of these interwoven and inseparable infrastructures and practices through their electricity use. Emerging social practices of charging smartphones in public and in transit offer an entry-point to theorizing the energy needs surrounding information and communication technologies locally, regionally, and globally. While the energy consumption of each device is very low, the sheer number of devices in use aggregates higher, and ties into the wider patterns of energy consumption from the backend of data centers, which use tremendous amounts of energy. The widespread adoption and constant use of smartphones signal the tangible end-point of electricity consumption patterns stretching across the world while also relying on locally-generated electricity at the same time. Nested case studies of charging practices in train stations in the Northeast United States, on the Amtrak trains that pass through these stations, and finally an examination of the electricity use of a prominent data center in Philadelphia provide an overview of how the powering of smartphone batteries and the mobile Internet represent conjoined infrastructures and, as such, frameworks for ‘new’ practices to develop creating qualitatively new forms of demand.

ABSTRACT. Energy use has for many decades been analysed in terms of its links with economic performance and development. In contrast, the role of energy in satisfying basic human needs has received much less (although somewhat increasing) attention. Two recent developments deserve mention:  in 2014, the UN-led “Sustainable Energy for All” was launched, focusing on energy access, renewable energy and energy efficiency.  More recently, the 9th Sustainable Development Goal is concerned with “affordable and clean energy.” However, neither of these is based on a clear theoretical understanding of how exactly energy contributes to satisfying human needs, or what level of energy is required for this. My research compares international energy use from a sufficiency perspective. I first develop a theoretical framework which connects specific types of direct and indirect energy use with human needs, building on Max-Neef’s “Human-Scale Development” framework and the “Theory of Human Need” of Doyal & Gough. Using both dynamic and static analysis of international energy use contrasted with socio-economic indicators of human need satisfaction, countries are compared in terms of their performance in satisfying human needs with different levels and types of energy use. Moreover, using this framework, energy use can be categorised as contributing to satisfying human needs (sufficiency energy) or used for other purposes: luxury consumption, destructive or negative uses, and so on. This research can thus inform and guide international debates on the social (as opposed to economic) requirements for energy use. It also can be used to understand the potential for energy savings by learning from countries with particularly high performance in satisfying universal human needs at low levels of energy use. More broadly, the area of energy use for human needs and human development deserves much more attention, given the twin challenges of achieving universal human development within the limits set by planetary boundaries. It is my hope that more social-science oriented energy research will move into this space.

ABSTRACT. We propose to focus our presentation on issues related to energy vulnerability in different cultural contexts in the EU, Asia and South America. On the basis of the cultural representations of poverty, of electrification policies and of consumption habits developed in each area we want to analyse the different realities covered by the concept of “energy vulnerability”. The aim of our research is 1. to examine the extent to which the concept of energy vulnerability, defined by Bouzarovski et al. (2014) as the risk for a household to experience inadequate energy services in the home in his daily life, is relevant and applicable to geographical areas outside the EU 2. to reassess the EU categories of vulnerable consumers when transferred to other economic, social and cultural situations. Considering the fact that 1.3 billion people in the world still lack access to electricity in 2012 and that around 52.1 million households across EU27 in 2010 have difficulties to pay their electricity and heating bills, our study will try to go beyond the sole accessibility and affordability issue to better understand the multidimensional aspect of energy vulnerability when embedded in different political, economic, social, institutional and cultural frameworks.

Our study is based on a desk research, on the analysis of internet corpus and expert interviews on issues related to the organisation of the State, of the energy sector, of the governance system, of social norms and cultural representations in each area. This cross national study could help better understand the construct of a concept such as energy vulnerability placed in different contexts. The preliminary results of the work in-progress show that different categories of vulnerable consumers emerge when comparing different cultural areas. They show for example that the deprivation of energy in South America and Asia affects not only poor people but also the middle-income class. If the EU focuses on energy affordability to try to understand who the fuel poor is, the Asian and South American countries show that energy vulnerability can be explained not only by the affordability of energy but also by the quality of the supply. Another result shows that the lack of physical connection does not always mean lack of consumption since illegal connections are often used to compensate for the lack of legal connection, therefore blurring the frontier between accessibility and affordability. We propose to put into discussion these questions in order to consolidate knowledge of the gap between the different realities of energy deprivation and present situation of energy services in the three geographical areas.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the discursive and material aspects of lighting services in relation to the enforced lack of basic necessities in the home. I focus on the rise of energy poverty – understood as the inability of households to secure adequate levels of domestic energy services – in crisis-hit Greece. My paper scrutinizes the circumstances under which the under-consumption of lighting leads to various forms of infrastructural and social deprivation. I also wish to uncover how the links between lighting and poverty are articulated via the physical, technical and economic underpinnings of home. In a more general sense, I highlight the everyday experiences of ‘lighting poverty’ as a specific, and hitherto largely neglected, form of institutionally- and technically-embedded hardship.

Empirically, the paper is based on field research undertaken in 2013 and 2014 under the EVENT (Energy Vulnerability in Northern Greece) project. This involved two sets of interviews and energy diaries with 25 households (including a total of 77 people) based in the city of Thessaloniki and its surroundings. The ethnographic work was preceded and followed by an analysis of documentary evidence, as well as 12 decision-maker interviews in both Athens and Thessaloniki. Conceptually, I relied on ‘energy services’ thinking (Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015; Sovacool 2011) to highlight the need for understanding fuel poverty beyond traditional metrics (e.g. prices, incomes, efficiency) and end-use benefits (particularly space heating and cooling).

The reviewed evidence points to the crucial role that lighting plays in not only offering a range of domestic comforts and functions, but in shaping individual and collective identities. The significant reduction of this service brought about by the economic crisis has thus triggered fundamental changes in people’s self-perceptions and social relations. At the same time, the entanglement of energy poverty in the appliances, infrastructures and norms (Bates et al., 2012) within which the residential environment of the home is bound and reproduced means that lighting has become an integral part of crisis-related dynamics of exclusion and precarisation, as well as strategies to overcome these predicaments.

While the under-consumption of lighting has impacted the symbolic and economic status of individuals and communities, it also transpired that needs and practices surrounding lighting have been used as a tool for the construction of crisis and as a mechanism for controlling vulnerable groups. This primarily refers to the discursive employment of notions of ‘darkness’ and ‘blackouts’ in public discourses of austerity. The narrow political framing of these narratives offers opportunities for resistance and resilience, in both the discursive arena – by subverting and challenging their vocabulary – and in material terms: by switching fuels and pooling resources.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses how certain forms of hypermobility - primarily air travel - are embedded in the institutional orientations of Australian universities, and hence, into the professional practices of Australian academics. Academic air travel is currently a key component of one's ability to cultivate and maintain 'network capital' (Larsen et al. 2008). Such forms of extended social capital are seen as promoting one’s ability to access the most prized elements of the academic career - international collaborations, high-impact journal publications, and research grants. In this sense, a system of 'academic aeromobility' has developed, in spite of the social and environmental implications that regular international & domestic air travel entails. Here, we discuss the results of a review of Australian university sustainability policies, and research & internationalization strategies. We find that the ambitions for universities to reduce carbon emissions by air travel are discordant with broader policies & institutional orientations around international mobility. These findings raise questions of how systems of mobility are developed and maintained in a professional setting, and how existing policies and practices co-evolve and change as part of a globalized research environment.

ABSTRACT. Over the last few years, obligations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions have led European States to propose ambitious targets concerning electrifying car fleets. In France for instance, electric vehicles are required to cover a quarter of all new car purchases in big companies and public administrations. In these organizations, departments that are traditionally in charge of company vehicles have thus been tasked to implement these policy decisions. General Resources have become de facto responsible for testing and managing these new EVs. Illustrating our results through five case-studies that took place in France in 2012-2015, we will show how these departments, and notably fleet managers, carry out the numerous tasks accompanying the spreading of EVs in their organizations: acquiring these vehicles (and the charging infrastructure), allocating them and managing the charging of the cars. The allocation, whether as fleet cars or executive ones, is an important step for the success of their implementation in these companies. We will also point out the contradictory significations and powerful constraints that complicate the performance of these tasks. Their achievement strengthens the role of the fleet managers, who turn out to be crucial but unexpected players in electricity demand.

ABSTRACT. The practice of working from home has become widespread in the UK and is on the rise. There are potentially positive implications for energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with home working, but these depend on myriad variables. Attending to the doings and sayings of home work provides a more in-depth perspective on the role of energy compared with quantitative models of household consumption. Whilst ‘energy sociology’ has investigated a range of energy consuming practices in the domestic setting, no study in this tradition has focussed on home working. This paper draws on interviews with fifteen home workers on the use of energy when working from home, finding three emerging themes: comfort, control and flexibility. Findings from interviews are presented according to these themes and the meanings, materials and competences of each are drawn out. The discussion combines ideas from practice theory, actor network theory and discourses of affect to argue that comfort, control and flexibility are bound up in the constellation of elements making up the practice of working from home, and that they emerge from performances which have both intentional and affective dimensions. Parallels are drawn between contemporary discourses of energy demand and the three themes, including adaptive comfort and its links with control; and flexibility and demand-side response. The conclusion summarises key ideas, suggests areas for further research and discusses implications for policy.

ABSTRACT. Reducing carbon costs of travel remains a key policy objective for most westernised governments; including the UK.  Though specific business travel data is limited (Beaverstock and Faulconbridge, 2010), available data indicates international and national business travel is stable or growing, irrespective of telecommunication use (Strengers, 2014). Studies examining the link between business travel and globalisation, meetings and technology/ infrastructure are now developed (Beaverstock et al, 2010; Jones, 2009; Sassen, 1999). Yet, this work points to more questions than solutions to reducing travel.  In particular, the extent to which business travel correlates with company strategy and spatial work arrangement is uncertain (Aguiléra, 2008).

Faulconbridge et al. (2009) propose viewing business travel as one component in a wider ecology of mobility.  Jones (2013) suggests shifting from description and classification of travel to understanding how travel helps achieve business outcomes.  These propositions allude to adopting a sociology of business travel (Haynes, 2005); such as business travel studies informed by the ‘mobility turn’ (eg: Haynes, 2010; Strengers, 2014; Urry, 2003).  Understanding growth in business travel therefore, requires a critical exploration of how the demand for business travel arises from the arrangement and negotiation of work; the topic of this paper.

This paper applies a system of practice perspective to help reveal the multidimensional factors that contribute to business travel.  Preliminary findings from a case study are drawn upon to reveal how UK-based global engineering consulting firms bid and arrange work help to generate business travel.  Arrangement is informed by factors such as office location and composition (eg: expertise and disciplines), public and private client relationships and coordinating multi-office project teams.  Negotiation is shaped by factors such as bidding, bid assembling and project location, and how bids account for project teams and travel and the subsequent doing of work.  Evidence indicates demand for business travel is not a simple story of substitution. The way work is done is changing, some of the reasons for travel are also changing. The relationship between globalisation, meetings and technology/ infrastructure and travel is acknowledged.  Yet, analytically re-focusing attention to understanding how arrangement and negotiation of work generate business travel is found to create new productive research avenues to understand demands for travel.  A set of factors which encourage continued high levels of business related mobility are identified and discussed; prominent being client demands, firm strategies, technology and intrinsic properties of work and projects.

ABSTRACT. Jim Watson, from UKERC, will comment on issues arising from the DEMAND Conference position papers on Change and Steering. He will reflect on issues explored in these papers, and in other contributions to the change and steering themes, and discuss those which relate the work and ambitions of UKERC. This presentation will provide new insights into the challenges of ‘steering’ demand.

ABSTRACT. The discussion papers for the conference discuss steering in terms of requirements for shaping changes in energy practices. But what, if steering is itself looked at as consisting in social practices?
I pick up from where Elizabeth ends in her “Beyond ABC” article. She says “a move beyond the ABC would have to go hand in hand with the emergence of new genres and styles of policy” (Shove 2010: 1283). So, how do new genres and styles of policy come into being then, if (invisible) policy-making is understood not in terms of interest and choice, but as compounds of meanings, materials and bodies?
I enter governing practices through a specific aspect of their meaning. I focus on functional models of governance, so called “instruments”. And I try to give a brief account of how they come into being and undergo change. My main points are conceptual, but for illustration I refer to cases of network access regulation, emissions trading, biodiversity credit trading, transition management, and citizen panels. A main point is to draw attention to the technoscientific configuration of governing practices in experiments, both in vitro and in vivo, and to the emergence of socio-technical regimes in governing.
In conclusion I ask how change in steering practices can be steered, or how to deal with a dominant policy paradigm? Here I refer to reflexive engagements with emerging technosciences of governing and to the challenge (for social scientists) of struggling for alternative ways of governing as a matter of concern, not a matter of fact, and with strategies of contriving, as much as of convincing. This is at least what follows from a social practices perspective on steering itself, I would argue.

ABSTRACT. This paper asks what role the state has in steering demand for mobility and why, despite its obvious relevance to policy imperatives such as climate change and congestion, the state seems to have an at best uneasy and inconsistent attachment to notions of demand and demand management. Through two UK based case studies (liberalisation of air transport and concessionary bus travel) we show, in different ways, the importance of government actions in shaping aspects of demand and, through examination of how these policies unfold over time, the recursive relationship between the promotion of demand and the increased challenge of managing it. We argue that the policies reviewed show the Department for Transport as developing demand inducing path-dependent practices that are proving hard to unpick. Moreover, we argue that demand-reduction, if and when recognised as a policy issue, is a wicked problem and one that will only get more wicked the longer it goes unrecognised as a systemic policy issue.

ABSTRACT. Urban automation (UA) is permeating out from the confines of the research laboratory, into the city, and increasingly throughout everyday life. Both globally and nationally, there is high expectation that UA will help to address a raft of contemporary social, environmental and economic challenges and this confidence is often supported by political decisions and substantial financial investment. Whilst this phenomenon holds much promissory value, research, policy and practice commonly maintain and reinforce an unproblematic and limited view of UA as technologically innovative, inter-connected, efficient and inclusive transformations towards ‘smarter’ cities and society. However developments in UA adopt diverse logics, are applied in multiple and interlinked domains, involve different sets of actors, practices and processes, and are reshaping the city and society in contrasting ways. Far from being uncontested, UA has the potential to substantially reconfigure the capabilities and capacities of human agency, infrastructure networks, and their everyday interactions. Indeed, such transformations are already having profound implications for societal governance, social practices, urban infrastructures and the environment.

Most work on UA has to date been speculative and isolated in nature, focusing on optimising emerging technological possibilities, issues of deployment and implementation, and harnessing insights from new ‘big data’ analytical methods. Where societal considerations of UA have been considered, they have predominantly related to regulatory, public acceptability, safety, data security and ethical concerns. At the same time, there has been a relative paucity of theoretical or empirical urban studies work on UA, and limited concerted attempts to systematically investigate UA as a topic in its own right. In contrast, here we propose a distinctive research agenda that focuses on the urban context as site of experimentation in UA, and that examines whether and how UA redefines and restructures the city in terms of governance, infrastructural organisation, citizenship and distributive justice. We develop an analytical framework to investigate and compare emerging logics of UA experimentation, which through attending to mode of configuration and everyday functionality, help to understand the breadth of assumptions, actors, processes, practices and societal implications associated with this phenomenon. By mapping this ecosystem of UA experimentation logics, we highlight an urgent set of research questions that through being addressed will enable better understanding of the current and prospective reinforcing and/or transformational potential of UA across the city and throughout society.

ABSTRACT. Smart meters are paving the way for a smarter future where automated appliances and intelligent energy systems present ample opportunities for effortless energy efficiency. In this view of the future, smart self-learning systems will optimize a home’s heating, switch off forgotten devices, and schedule high demand consumption for low demand periods. However,   to ensure that such a smart vision can become a smart reality, it is vital to understand potential future customers’ reaction to ‘smart automation’ scenarios as a guide to their design, implementation and marketing. Accordingly, in the following paper I will present survey and focus group data that investigates the issues surrounding automation and identifies consumers’ dreams and nightmares with respect to the “smarter” future. The data suggests that underlying these dreams and nightmares are factors related to the pursuit of subjective well-being through the satiation of some core fundamental human needs.  For instance, automation is more likely to be accepted when it promotes feelings of competence and avoids violating autonomy. I will conclude by proposing a theoretical framework that may offer one route to understanding potential consumer acceptance of automation.

ABSTRACT. Resonating with the industrial revolution of the home (Schwartz-Cowan 1989), the smart home ‘digital revolution’ reinvigorates promises for convenience and simplicity. This paper analyses the industry vision for a ‘simple life’, and asks what energy implications it is likely to generate. We draw on an international magazine and online media content analysis of the 21st smart home, alongside interviews conducted with Australian smart home industry professionals.
Our analysis explores the contradiction between complexity and simplicity embodied in smart home industry visions, where an expanded range of devices, services and options are marketed as a way to simplify and enhance everyday practices and experiences. A promoted side-benefit of this easy life is reduced and more efficient energy consumption. Rather than taking these claims at face value, we unpack the meanings and expectations embodied in this current version of simplicity to ask whether smart home devices can transform everyday practices in ways which also result in increased energy consumption.

We approach this task through several examples, analysed through the lens of social practice theory (Shove et al. 2012). First, we consider how smart home lighting and audio visual controls aim to simplify an expanded range of aesthetic practices intended to moderate mood and sensory experience in the smart home, whilst simultaneously saving energy. Second, we explore how smart cleaning appliances intended to simplify practices by re-assigning their performance to automated devices may serve to heighten cleanliness standards. Third, we explore how energy monitoring and management is framed as its own practice, which is then ‘simplified’ through increasingly complex monitoring and automation.

In exploring the energy implications associated with this pursuit for simplicity, we show how the introduction of new digital materials into domestic practices reproduces more energy-intensive meanings and expectations, and potentially encourages the proliferation of new practices that use energy.  Additionally, the re-distribution of competence to perform everyday practices (from people to devices) generates further energy consumption. We conclude with cautious scepticism regarding the energy reduction promises embodied in the smart home vision for the simplification of everyday life.

ABSTRACT. Given the extensive research literature on energy in buildings, especially housing, it is striking how little there is on the home.  Even though recent socio-technical studies within energy do start to include ideas and notions of what the home means to people there is still room for expanding this area. From sociology, geography and architecture, there is a longer tradition for working on ideas, concepts and practices of home.  Here we learn that a house and a home are two fundamentally different things and there are discussions on how people appropriate houses and thus turn them into homes and discussions on whether home should be seen as a place, a feeling or a practice?  On the other hand, we also have within the energy related literature a growing focus on how smart homes in smart grids can be part of a sustainable future.  Bringing discussions on what a home is into the field of residential energy consumption, and especially the emerging focus on smart homes as a low-carbon and grid-management ‘solution’, thus seems highly relevant.  
In this paper we thus bring these two discussions together. This raises the question of whether aspects of smart home visions can be compatible with more traditional understandings of being ‘at home’. Or are the two fundamentally at odds with each other?

The first part of the paper includes a brief review of the literature on visions and realities of smart homes, with a focus on energy management.  We then discuss traditional concepts of home and how it is that people go about transforming a building, into something that carries meaning and supports their activities.  These concepts of home as a repository of meaning, a site for activity and a work in progress are explored with the aid of examples from previous research on the meaning of home among different types of households in Denmark and the UK.

Smart home visions and realities are then compared with our theoretically and empirically-derived notions of home and the practices that are part of ‘feeling at home,’ in an attempt to develop theoretical understandings of what a smart home might mean, what activities it might support, and how it might develop.  We show how some smart home visions concentrate on automating basic daily routines, while others may include strikingly new functionalities and introduce new ideas of what a home is– for example, a unit that must be managed for the benefit of the systems to which it is attached. These visions are interpreted within ideas of practice theory, noting how agency is distributed, analysing how bodily routines are part of home practices, and indicating what may happen if these routines are automated.

ABSTRACT. This paper is part of a broader research project (2015-2017) focused on household electricity consumption in Western Switzerland, based on relating energy consumption to social practices and norms. Here, we explore notions of expectations, entitlement and excesses around the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) by households, focusing on both products (e.g., phones, computers, screens, video games, televisions, etc.), and services (e.g., access to music, films, social networks, information, etc.). We reveal how expectations can change over space and time, in relation to inter-generational dynamics, life courses, or changes in geographic settings, and how some of these expectations will no doubt evolve into feelings of entitlement. We also consider how people experience mandatory or voluntary ICT restrictions in connectivity.  We uncover tensions around ICT usage, and discuss what this means in terms of opportunities to reduce or restrict energy consumption. While we recognize that the use of certain electronic devices, such as smart phones, may not be significant in and of themselves in terms of energy usage per unit, we see their active and standby usage as part of a growing trend worldwide (OECD/IEA 2014). ICTs are on the one hand touted as promoting greater sustainability, but also noted for direct and indirect energy consumption (Hilty and Aebischer 2015; Grant, Seager et al. 2010). ICTs are also relevant in relation to their “pervasive integration” across everyday practices (Røpke, Christensen et al. 2010), as our research also demonstrates. We consider ICT a particularly fruitful area to explore as social norms around (dis)connecting seem to be far from static: what is deemed acceptable or not in terms of ICT access and restrictions is an ongoing field of inquiry.

ABSTRACT. Energy systems are the main source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. As physical supply systems, they are, therefore, failing to deliver crucial demands of modern societies in a sustainable manner. This is aggravated by the way in which we use such systems: the ways in which we “consume” energy. Moreover, social and economic systems – currently dominated by neoliberal policies – are increasing the inequalities between the rich and the poor locally, regionally and globally. By increasing poverty and social fragmentation, they are, therefore, failing to deliver basic human needs to ever more large portions of the population. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between energy services and human needs, and thus try to propose combined insights into energy and socio-economic systems.

Human needs are understood here (building on the work of Manfred Max-Neef (1995, 1991), and Len Doyal and Ian Gough (1991)) as the social (as opposed to individual) conditions necessary for human wellbeing, which have both lower and upper limits (O’Neill, 2011). Human wellbeing is in turn understood as adequate social participation in a chosen form of life, an evaluation that is objective and universally comparable across cultures, as opposed to other subjective measures of wellbeing. The way in which human needs are satisfied (through “satisfiers”), however, is culturally specific (Max-Neef, 1991). Energy services are the functions we actually demand from energy systems: as with human needs, the way in which energy services are supplied may be culturally specific (Jochem et al., 2000; Shove et al., 2008). The main advantage of combining the concepts of human needs and energy services is that analysing their relationships could guide an improved delivery of energy services as satisfiers of human needs, within a climate constrained world.

In particular, this presentation will propose a framework relating the concepts of energy services and human needs. Energy services and their combinations within socio-economic systems are examined as satisfiers of human needs: consequently the level at which we demand energy services is expected to be culturally specific. Firstly, the theoretical framework of human needs and energy services will be described. Secondly, a proposed framework for analysing different societies will be shown, consisting of a quantitative and a qualitative element. Finally, some concluding remarks and discussion of future research involving applying the proposed framework to undertake empirical analysis for Colombia. Such an exercise could shed light on the difference in level of satisfier use between different subgroups of society, and highlight some common ground in terms of the specific links between energy services and human needs.

ABSTRACT. Housing is an important area in energy research, accounting for up to 45% of a nation’s energy consumption (Golubchikov and Deda, 2012). Domestic energy demand varies considerably by country, climate, building type, occupancy patterns and inhabitant’s lifestyles. Furthermore, these factors are part of the history of home making which influences everyday life and the physical form of homes today; what constitutes ‘normal’ home life or expectations of comfort evolves. Thus, to understand domestic energy demand it is important to consider the diverse meanings of home (Aune, 2007; Wilhite et al., 1996). Yet housing and home literature has received relatively little consideration in domestic energy research (Ellsworth-Krebs et al., 2015). This paper delves into home literature and the making of the home, emphasising key themes and how they relate to understanding domestic energy demand.

I suggest that the home-as-haven, the obduracy of the hearth, changing gender roles, blurring boundaries between family and household, and increasing expectations of privacy are themes receiving considerable attention in literature on the home and deserving avenues of investigation for understanding everyday life and taken-for-granted expectations of home comfort. Understanding homeliness, home comfort, and home-making is significant because the history of home suggests that cost, thermal comfort, and technical innovation are not simply the drivers of change, yet these are the focus in energy research. Recognising the importance of past home-making, I conclude with a plea for energy scholars to turn from researching the uptake of energy efficiency improvements, as if they occur in isolation, to thinking more broadly about the meanings of home improvement and home making. Home refurbishment is not simply rational or functional and the potential to intervene in everyday domestic life, or expectations of ‘normality’, would be enhanced by attending more to the meaning and making of home.


Aune, M. (2007). Energy comes home. Energy Policy, 35(11), 5457-5465.
Ellsworth-Krebs, K., Reid, L., & Hunter, C. J. (2015). Home-ing in on domestic energy research:“House,”“home,” and the importance of ontology. Energy Research and Social Science, 6, 100-108.
Golubchikov O, Deda P. (2012). Governance, technology, and equity: an integrated policy framework for energy efficient housing. Energy Policy, 41, 733–41.
Wilhite, H., Nakagami, H., Masuda, T., Yamaga, Y. and Haneda, H. (1996). A cross-cultural analysis of household energy use behaviour in Japan and Norway, Energy Policy, 24(9), 795-803.

ABSTRACT. The idea that human activities are best understood in relation to emerging and evolving pathways has become established within multiple strands of social scientific thought. Despite the dominance of mobility-related cases, for example in transportation research, there has been limited exploration of how these ideas might contribute to broader understandings of energy demand. This paper argues that further conceptualisation and investigation of pathways in relation to the temporal and spatial patterns of energy-demanding activities offers important contributions. In particular, it develops an understanding of ‘potential pathways’ drawing upon Schatzki’s work. After differentiating this concept from understandings of constraints within time geography, it argues that ‘potential pathways’ highlight both objective and non-objective spatio-temporalities, as well as both individual and shared dynamics, all the while ensuring that potential pathways (and energy demand) is seen as more than the remainder left behind after considering constraints.

ABSTRACT. Mobile technologies link together and facilitate interactions among diverse personal and social projects. In turn, smartphone-based activity and time use logging might offer new insights into how people tie together distributed sites of energy demand in the course of everyday life. The availability of richer activity data has prompted more dynamic, activity-based approaches to understanding the relationship of the built environment to activity patterns, but these quantitative methods of inquiry might also support practice-oriented approaches. In this study, I combine the concepts of energy intensity of activities (Jalas 2002; Minx and Baiocchi 2009) with activity space analysis and pattern mining to identify routine patterns, explore how to infer the social practices that the routines might reveal, and explain how the energy intensity of routines might be conditioned by the urban environments in which they are performed.

The empirical context is Singapore, where the user-validated, multi-day activity logs of approximately 300 study participants (collected by the Singapore-MIT Alliance Future Mobility Sensing project) are connected with demographic information, building-level home energy consumption, and estimates of nonresidential energy intensity. First, I examine how participants who extend their routines (working, eating, and leisure) beyond the home change their direct energy consumption patterns across in-home, out-of-home, and travel energy services. Second, using a database of built environment descriptors, I statistically evaluate which spatial characteristics explain the observed bundles of activities and their associated travel patterns, and what might explain the difference between the observed and potential use of existing urban infrastructure--for example, the probability in different neighborhoods of walking to shopping instead of driving.

Preliminary results suggest that inhabitants of Singapore's urban environment enact lifestyles that have no dominant patterns across the direct energy demands of in-home, out-of-home, and mobility activities; the urban environment nearly equally supports low-carbon and high-carbon patterns across every demographic group. I also consider what dimensions are missing from the activity tracking methods in terms of adopting a practice-oriented approach, such as social interactions across different sites, and what essential insights cannot be captured by these methods that depend on digital technologies. These ICT-enabled methods should, however, help to describe the diversity of coexisting practices in urban spaces and help to compare the capacity of different urban systems to support low-carbon activity patterns.

ABSTRACT. The design of policies and interventions aiming at the reduction of energy consumption requires a good understanding of the sociological logics that underlie consumption.

In this perspective, this paper focuses on individual lifestyles, and on how geographic location and household equipment can play a role on daily activities within and outside home. It also focuses on the relation between appliances, housing, lifestyles and energy consumption.

This analysis is based on an ad hoc survey of 2000 French households, in the late 2013. The questionnaire was focused on the relationship between daily activities, mobility and energy consumption. This detailed description was associated to a range of structuring questions about the choice of residential location and equipment, and values. Complementary technical information was also collected on the household building, appliances, and socio-demographics. We have also performed a socio-spatial characterization of the studied territories, thanks to data from the French statistical office (INSEE).

Our initial analysis consists in clustering the respondents based on their stated daily activities and values, after showing these variables can be associated to form lifestyles. We propose here to consider both short and long term choices respectively made at the individual and household levels. Then we study the relationship between these lifestyles and territorial services and types of building. Finally, we describe how these various lifestyles, in combination with the associated territories, buildings and appliances, involve different types and levels of energy consumption.

At the individual level, we notice that energy consumption depends on the observed interaction between lifestyles and technical systems (appliances, housing…). On the territory level, our first results suggest that there is a weak relationship between lifestyle and urban form. This relationship is strengthened if we fine-tune the characterisation of the residential territory. Some lifestyles tend to be closer to certain services without affecting their related mobility patterns. The proximity of an equipment to a mobility node seems to affect the effective mobility towards this equipment.

ABSTRACT. The notion that energy is used as part of everyday practices has opened up new directions for research seeking to intervene in energy demand. To date, however, the insights of social practice theory have had a limited impact on conventional forms of energy modelling and, as a result, on energy policy. This paper explores the challenges of attempting to ‘model’ social practices, drawing on techniques from practice network analysis to map the links between both elements and practices.

It will use commuting as an example of a deeply complex and embedded sociotechnical system of particular relevance for two reasons: the expected future increase in vehicle electrification and its tendency to happen during times of peak energy demand. The timing and flexibility of this demand is of interest because the ability to shift demand will allow peak shaving in the short term and the inclusion of a higher percentage of intermittent renewables on the grid in the longer term, both of which will help to lower carbon emissions.

The paper reports on new empirical survey data in which participants sought to ‘map’ their commuting practices and their connections with other practices (both through shared elements and across time). This data is used to generate practice network maps of commuting.

There are several benefits to this approach over either the standard quantitative modelling approaches that currently dominate understandings of travel behaviour or standard practice based approaches (often based solely on qualitative data which can be difficult to scale up, quantify or communicate), namely:
1. It helps differentiate between the core and peripheral elements of a practice which opens up questions about which points of a practice might be more, or less, amenable to intervention.
2. It helps identify critical clusters or ecologies of practice that are tightly interconnected and that may therefore be difficult to shift in time or might have significant knock-on effects if they are moved in time.
3. It focuses on the connections between practices within wider ecologies, encouraging energy modellers to broaden their understanding of the ‘contexts’ of energy demand. As such the role of policy and planning practices in shaping commuting practices becomes relevant and poses far-reaching questions about where to target interventions to make energy demand more flexible.

The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader challenges and (in)compatibilities of integrating social practice inspired approaches with quantitative energy models.

ABSTRACT. Urban retrofitting, the redesign of buildings to increase energy performance, is key policy for a global  energy transition. This paper presents a conceptual framework for analysing retrofit drawing on social practice theory to analyse the interplay between domestic practices and the institutional, cultural, and technological arrangements in urban retrofitting projects. The studies are currently executed in a joint project of Chinese and Dutch researchers on smart urban retrofitting in China and the Netherlands.  The aim is to identify the social and institutional conditions under which smart retrofitting of urban housing may lead to decoupling of domestic energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents preliminary findings of retrofitting cases in urban China which support the assumption that success of smart retrofit is conditioned by inclusion of residents and their domestic energy practices in retrofitting processes. The paper concludes with a reflection on the intended comparison to be made  between the Chinese and Dutch cases of housing retrofitting from a social practice point of view.

ABSTRACT. Mobility is a key, growing source of energy demand, especially in fast-developing, populous countries like China.  Transition in urban mobility systems, especially given China’s rapid, extensive urbanization, is thus a key case study regarding energy demand futures.  There is much high-profile focus on China’s ambitious industrial policy regarding electric cars (EVs), but an indigenous, bottom-up innovation of arguably greater significance is often overlooked: the e-bike.  E-bikes are more energy efficient – regarding production, distribution and use – than even the most efficient EV, given both significantly lower mass and ease of movement, avoiding idling in congestion.  A transition to urban mobility system built around e-bikes could, thus, have significantly diminished energy demand.  Such a system of mobility (and not just ‘transport’), however, must also necessarily change the situated practices of day-to-day life from which demand for mobility (thus energy demand) emerges. 

European governments such as Germany are currently setting national goals to increase heavily the use of e-bikes. In China, there are already 200 million e-bike users, but they find themselves in a different situation: there is no national program to increase cycling, although attempts to get people on bikes instead of cars have been made; and, to the contrary, e-bikes are positively discouraged in many localities. Their regulation is highly fragmented as each city sees e-bikes differently. This attitude varies from banning e-bikes in the city centre (Shenzhen), stipulating tougher speed-limits (Chengdu) or introducing licenses (Shanghai).  Moreover, a singular barrier to broader systemic effect is the e-bike’s popular association with lower socio-cultural status or ‘quality’ (suzhi). In a society in which ‘high quality’ consumer display, not least through mobility choices, is a primary social concern, this raises the key question of whether the e-bike’s spectacular growth is merely a temporary stepping-stone to ever-increasing car ownership or could indeed seed a broader system transition.

Drawing on data from focus-group interviews and fieldwork observations conducted in 2014-2015, we show the answer to this question is not clear-cut, as the boundaries between ‘high quality’ car ownership and ‘low quality’ e-bike use are blurring.  Nonetheless, the prospects of an e-bike-centred system transition seem slim, despite the massive demotic demand for e-bike mobility.  This thus raises questions about how some forms of energy demand are ‘more equal’ than others as regards impact on trajectories of change, and how the complex nexuses of situated socio-technical practices constituting mobility demand change with systemic effect (or not).  We will address these questions through discussion of the importance of considering power relations as central in analysis of energy (mobility) demand and the ‘powering of power’ (i.e. the enabling of energy systems); issues of power that are made particularly clear when considering the case of mobility innovation in China.

ABSTRACT. Unsurprisingly, Hanoi and Copenhagen are seldom subject to comparative analyses. The two cities have little in common, apart from a flat topography and both being capital cities. They do however share an interesting history of vélomobility. Both cities also witnessed significant challenges to the dominance of bicycles, in Copenhagen through cars from the 1960s onwards, in Hanoi from motorbikes starting in the 1980s. And this is when the comparison gets really interesting, and where the mobility paths of the two cities have taken radically different turns.
 
In Copenhagen the bicycle famously returned to its dominant position and the city attains international acclaim for its bicycle friendly infrastructure. 45 per cent of all commuting trips were carried out on a bicycle in 2014, and the modal share of bicycles continues increasing. Hanoi, by contrast, is now completely dominated by motorised two-wheelers. With 4 million motorbikes, an average of 2.4 motorbikes per household, the modal share of bicycles has rapidly decreased and is now miniscule. The extent to which the Vietnam’s capital has changed into a highly pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly city is remarkable. And rather than the bicycle returning to challenge the motorbikes, cars are emerging as a powerful competitor in the streetscapes of the Vietnamese capital.

As air pollution and congestion are reaching alarming levels in Hanoi, powerful voices are calling for the bicycle to return. We consider whether there are lessons to be learned from Copenhagen’s bicycle revolution, as well as what factors represent the main barriers to vélomobility in contemporary Hanoi. Do social and cultural differences matter, or is it largely a question of infrastructure?

Based on mobile methods, observations and interviews, this paper approaches these two diverging mobility paths from a practice perspective, focusing on how material, social and cultural factors have shaped the particularities of Hanoi’s and Copenhagen’s streetscapes. This involves a consideration of changing systems of provision, policy prioritization and the role of ‘civil society’, but mainly focuses on the changing role of two-wheelers in carrying out everyday practices in the two capital cities. The paper thus contributes to further extending the scope of mobility and consumption research beyond the mature capitalist world, bringing important new knowledge on energy use in an emerging economy. It also argues for the value of new and original comparisons across the old divides of ‘North’ and ‘South’.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary urban mobility systems produce negative impacts. The dominance of the individual use of internal combustion cars causes unsustainable patterns of energy consumption. Policy has been searching for a transition into more sustainable mobility paradigms. Namely, the switch from individual to collective modes of transport. The direction of the transition is uncertain due to the socio-technical-economic dynamics which occur in the urban space. The present work identifies drivers and inhibitors of a transition into a collective transport based mobility system. The project takes the city of Curitiba and the city of Porto as case studies. Curitiba is a Brazilian city, worldwide known by its transport system. Curitiba’s bus rapid transit system was emulated by cities around the world. In the end of XX Century, 75% of local population used the bus system for commuting. Now is down to 45%. The bus has been replaced by the car as the main mode of transport. Porto is a Portuguese city which benefited with the implementation of a metro light rail system in the beginning of XXI Century. Despite this public investment, nowadays the majority of local population uses the car for commuting. The present project studies both mobility systems. The same theoretical framework is applied to both cases. But Curitiba and Porto are cities with different contexts. They have particular geographic, social, cultural, technological and economic characteristics. Even the notion of transition may be different among local policy makers. The challenge to be discussed in the DEMAND conference 2016 is what can and cannot be extracted and compared in these two case studies. How to proceed in order to get a fair and reasonable comparison? The inducer of the DEMAND conference debate will be the presentation of this project on mobility transitions, its theoretical bases and research methodology, as well as the revelation of findings from the research on Curitiba and Porto’s local mobility systems.

ABSTRACT. Making use of the information and incentive tools available in both the public space and in the marketplace, public energy-saving policies devotes considerable space to the “consumer citizen”. The dissemination of statements articulating values, social norms and actions which favour energy-saving practices and blame excessive energy consumption is indeed part of a new statement regime (Foucault, 1969): it legitimates these public policies whilst at the same time driving discursive practices aimed at encouraging energy sufficiency.
This communication will attempt to explain some of the sociolinguistic modalities of these discursive practices in relation to the reception, transformation and repeated use of statements concerning the public energy-saving “solution”.
It starts by presenting a survey device and a situational analysis which allow us, from a sociolinguistic standpoint, to characterize public statements relating to energy saving. The survey is mainly based on an experimental protocol which leaves a great deal of room for open-ended questions. In particular, albeit without going into details (Brugidou, 2013), it points out a distinction between public statements of stigmatization, aimed at criticizing any individual deviation from the norm (in this case, energy saving), and statements of denunciation (Boltanski, 1984), justifying or challenging the values and/or modalities of public energy-saving policies.
However, it seems important to make clear that this analytical comparison covers a continuum, in which hybrid forms stand out – statements that can be described as “protopolitical” to the extent that they present the characteristics of expressions of both stigma and political denunciation. The study of these is an avenue of research not to neglect because they clarify certain ways problems are politicized.

This communication will specifically seek to describe the modalities of circulation between these different enunciative positions. The analysis of responses shows that many answers have certain traits of stigma but also own features to the political denunciation.
The most characteristic responses of this view are those who stigmatize not an individual, but a group. Therefore it is not the behavior that is mentioned but an attribute that is, in the same movement essentialized and associated with a collective: it is so ‘the mighty’ or more rarely ‘the poor’ or the ‘EDF agents’, ‘the industrialist’, ’the elderly’ or ‘youngster’ etc. designated as responsible.

ABSTRACT. In this communication, we propose a cross-focused analysis connecting how the notion of basic/fundamental need is put in words in French media discourses to the way(s) French households incorporate it according to their own rationales, social trajectories, inherited or adopted practices.
We will draw our presentation both on a semiotic analysis (media discourses) and a sociological field study carried out in recent years.

Media are argued to play an important role in constructing and circulating discourses across and within societies; language, tone, text (and images) are key ways through which ideas and values about the world are constituted, incorporated and socially shared. In our analysis, we observe that in France the notion of ‘fundamental needs’ seems to join a very political frame with the idea of a real social struggle. Implicitly, this notion seems to be linked with an ideological vision rather humanist of the world (instead of a pragmatic approach of it as it seems to be the case in other countries). It is also linked with other topics as fuel poverty (precarious, dysfunctional social situations) or environmental issues especially climate change (strategies that attempt to manage or reduce energy demand in the face of climate change). However, this notion joins essentially the field of the “solidarity” and of a universal and continuous access to energy.

We will then explore and put in perspective how this normative-driven media discourse is embodied in and echoing (or not) with energy end-users reality and underlying rationales. Our interpretation will be based on a specific secondary analysis of a corpus of in-depth interviews conducted with low-income households in the Greater Paris region (I). To that effect, we will focus on what they considered normal, essential, socially desirable or not, or rather luxurious and unnecessary, negotiable or not, and related rationales according to people’s models of life, resources and constraints.  We will also point out their views about how ‘the system works’ (market, politic and Civil Society agency)and their perception of media discourses.

We will finally highlight similarities (for instance, mobile and Internet access as a basic need) and divergences (for instance, political/ideological frame in media discourses vs ideology crisis and defiance towards politics among interviewees) between both analysis, aiming to provide comprehensive interpretations and open up the discussion about the making and  possible tranformation of social norms towards sufficiency and  more sustainable consumption.
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(I) Région Ile-de-France, on-going re-analysis to be completed by the end of 2015. The primary corpus (n=60) has been collected within the framework of ANR Project ENERGYHAB.

ABSTRACT. Are conventions accelerating and converging at a global level? Are we coming to expect the same energy-intensive conditions all over the world? How do these changes happen and how can change be studied?

Cleanliness is one example that has seen a global synchronisation in accepted ways of doing at an increasing level over the last hundred years (Vigarello, 1988; Ashenburg, 2007; Shove, 2003). One can easily find daily-showering people, domestic vacuum cleaners and tumble-dried sheets —amongst other evidence of accelerating cleanliness — the world over. Expecting similar cleanliness conditions regardless of location has particular implications for not only energy consumption, but also water, chemicals and raw materials used in to attain changing cleanliness conventions.

Understanding how these changes arose is not straightforward: is public communication of the health imperative important, or perhaps the increasing availability of residential energy and plumbing, peer pressure or even an evil plot by soap companies to sell more products? How did increased cleanliness practices become conventional?

As a first step in approaching these questions I collected representations of cleanliness in popular media from Melbourne (Australia), Mysore (India) and Malmö (Sweden) over the last three decades. I scanned three widely read women’s magazines from each country; four issues each from 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2015, a total of 216 magazines, which provided thousands of pages of cleanliness editorial and advertising. While magazine content may show an idealised moment from various cleanliness practices, and have particular agendas, the creators themselves are immersed in their cultural context and therefor must at least echo social normality. The magazines show a general acceleration in the quantity of cleanliness related content; they also show an increasing emphasis on beautiful and glamorous people. That cleanliness representations have changed more or less in sync across the three countries is interesting in and of itself. Refracting this data through time-use and domestic energy and water consumption further allows a consideration of the possible effects between media and changing conventions. Australia, India and Sweden are three very different countries in terms of cultural expectations, infrastructures and resource availability, but even so representations of cleanliness are alarmingly similar. Their similarities and occasional differences suggest that media is one element in the global acceleration and convergence of cleanliness practices.

ABSTRACT. This paper will explore the significant role that policy path dependency plays in locking us in to current practices and constraining the nature and rate of change in energy demand. It will focus on the constraints created by systems of governance and will consider an empirical case study in UK energy governance.

ABSTRACT. This paper will discuss the results of the Japanese ‘Cool biz’ programme. It argues that the programme succeeded in reducing energy intensive practices, but not at all in the way that was intended. Following the policy through to its effects on daily life demonstrates the need for a situated account of change and influence.

ABSTRACT. This contribution explores some of the methodological challenges involved in analysing the relationship between policy and practice, and how policies can steer energy demand. The paper will include a discussion of different ways of thinking about welfare policy impact and outline an approach to examining the ways that policy shapes practice, with implications for energy demand.

ABSTRACT. How we control the things in our homes that use energy has a large impact on the energy efficiency of the building. But people have very limited energy literacy in understanding these relationships [1]and the onslaught of new smart home technologies do little to support more effective use. Why is this? Research points to the disconnect between how devices and tools for energy management are designed and the ways people use energy in their daily lives [2]-[4].
Energy management requires either explicit manual control or automated response based  on some computationally determined condition. Typically the latter depends on simple algorithms like motion detection or schedule, although the arrival of machine-learning devices like the Nest™ thermostat claim success of more fine-grained response to patterns of daily use.   However, automated systems have a long history of user resistance and lack of success.  Our research is focused on how to enable residents to make appropriate resource use decisions in their homes without imposing undue technological complexity or effort: in other words, to examine the potential of optimizing home energy efficiency through better computational models of how people use it.  But what might these models comprise, and how might we determine the metrics, parameters and factors that define them? In this paper we discuss this emerging design space and describe an initial taxonomy we have developed for user studies in home use. We base this on an ongoing study of residents’ experience in high-standard “green” buildings where automation forms part of the energy efficiency strategy factored against  current algorithmic approaches to mapping energy use in the home.
[1] L. Bartram, “Design Challenges and Opportunities for Eco-Feedback in the Home,” Computer Graphics and APplications, IEEE, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 52–62.
[2] Y. Strengers, “Smart energy in everyday life: are you designing for resource man?,” interactions, vol. 21, no. 4, Jul. 2014.
[3] M. Goulden, Ben Bedwell, S. Rennick-Egglestone, T. Rodden, and A. Spence, “Smart grids, smart users? The role of the user in demand side management,” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 2, pp. 21–29, Jun. 2014.
[4] S. Intille, “The goal: smart people, not smart homes,” Smart Homes And Beyond: Icost 2006, 4th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, p. 3, 2006.

ABSTRACT. This paper makes the case that software updates contribute significantly to demand for Internet communication and services. Using available data, it explores some of the ways that software updates contribute to the growth of digital traffic volumes and peaks: these include automated updates, the raising of video and audio fidelity, major release events, and increased time-use of applications for communicating and watching video.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how automated HVAC systems and building management policies and procedures shape thermal comfort perceptions, expectations, and energy demand in non-domestic buildings. The empirical basis is qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with building occupants and facilities managers in three UK institutions, recruited in relation to comfort complaints. We argue that ‘automation’ usually means ‘regulation’ for building management and the operation of HVAC systems in workplaces, and that this is detrimental for energy demand because it objectivises comfort and reinforces expectations of indoor climate provision.

Thermal comfort is not uniform, and the variation in thermal comfort preferences and perceptions in shared work spaces results in a prevalence of conflict that is escalated rather than mitigated by the automation of mechanical HVAC systems. Regulation through automation detaches building occupants from management and control and in doing so it reinforces the centrality of energy-reliant systems in thermal comfort, and deemphasises the responsibility that building occupants hold in this regard. We show that during negotiations about thermal comfort in the workplace, the very presence of a control system that provides automation by design, opens the system up to be held fully accountable for thermal discomforts. When occupants find it challenging to express and reach satisfactory resolutions with management for their subjective and situated experiences of discomfort, they look to mechanical system operation for leverage. We relate how systems are held accountable by occupants for inconsistencies in what they promise (algorithmically), and what they provide. In this way, conversations about thermal comfort move from subjective feelings and circumstances to objective setpoints and services, resulting in a mismatch between comfort and energy demand, but also in an increased reliance on energy for comfort.

We argue that we must shift the role of automation away from regulation to loosen indoor climate control and demand a larger role for occupants in thermal comfort. We draw on related work on Adaptive Thermal Comfort [Nicol and Humphreys 2002; Clear et al. 2013] to consider roles for automation that allow for this. We argue that to reduce the energy demand associated with thermal comfort, comfort must be framed differently – as adaptive, rather than tightly specified and bounded – and that acceptance of such framings requires broader changes in organisational cultures, including where responsibility lies in building management.

1. Adrian K. Clear, Janine Morley, Mike Hazas, Adrian Friday, and Oliver Bates. 2013. Understanding adaptive thermal comfort: new directions for UbiComp. In Proceedings UbiComp '13. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113-122. 

2. J. Fergus Nicol, and Michael A. Humphreys. 2002. Adaptive thermal comfort and sustainable thermal standards for buildings. Energy and buildings, 34(6), 563-572. 


ABSTRACT. Whether through setting and forgetting schedules; sensing action sequences and automating responses, or providing remote control functionality, one of the core promises of smart homes is that they will provide more ‘control’ over the domestic environment. The energy demand management possibilities of smart homes rest critically on this control functionality being realised and used. At the same time, social science research on smart homes has long been aware of what Randall termed the ‘control paradox’ wherein more advanced control capabilities can lead to householders feeling ‘out of control’ of their homes.

Among other ironies of automation, control has long been a core theme of work on smart homes. Much of this work has focussed on the technical challenge of making automated devices communicate with one another, or on designing user-friendly interfaces. As a result, it has neglected other ways of understanding control in smart homes. This paper begins by developing a conceptual framework for future research on control in the smart home. The framework identifies 4 distinct approaches to control: i) artefactual – focussed on the control of technical devices, ii) perceptual – focussed on householders perceptions of control over their homes, iii) relational – focussed on relationships between householders and who is ‘in control’ of household tasks, iv) socio-technical – focussed on the distribution of control between technology and society.

The paper applies this conceptual framework to new qualitative data from repeat interviews with 10 households engaged in a smart home field trial. In the trial, homes were equipped with a range of off-the-shelf technologies that enabled the automated and remote control of a range of appliances.

Key findings include:
• Narrow understandings of control focussed on devices and householders perceptions dominate the research and policy literature. By contrast, broader understandings focussed on relations between householders and the distribution of control between society and technology are equally if not more important among householders, and thus to shaping how smart homes are actually used.
• The smart home systems installed in the trial served in some cases to concentrate control over domestic appliances in one individual’s hands – usually the householder with most technical confidence or competence.
• The individual who controlled the smart home technologies was not always the same person that was in control of key household practices such as setting the heating, childcare, or preparing meals. In some instances this led to conflicts between householders and the abandonment of the smart home systems.