University of Sheffield
Dr. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield. His research explores themes of consumption, waste and mobility to advance understandings of the dynamics of everyday practices in relation to sustainability, and the means through which those practices are shaped and governed.
Listen to Matt’s Futures Fair 09 presentation.
Can we normalise sustainable technologies and low carbon interventions?
Technological interventions are always interventions into culture. Products and services that promise to improve the energy sustainability of the existing housing stock are interventions into the meanings, routines and practices of people’s homes. This presentation will pull out some key insights from current understandings of consumer culture, and of what goes on in the spaces of the home, to show how they can help in the design of energy products, technologies and services for retrofitting.
Confronting the meanings and routines of the home helps us understand both the dynamics that have caused increasing domestic energy demand and the issues which slow the uptake of simple cost-effective ‘fit and forget’ measures like loft insulation. Contemporary ways of understanding the practices of everyday life, by going beyond simple ideas of consumer choice, can reveal both challenges and opportunities for the ‘normalisation’ of more demanding interventions such as heat pumps or household scale energy production.
