RESUMO
Smart home technology is expected to be widespread in the future and to accommodate a green transition to reduce and time-shift energy consumption. However, smart technologies also have social consequences, which are important to understand. At a basic level, we need to know more about learning to live with these technologies and how they influence our everyday practices and routines. Providing in-depth longitudinal insights into these processes, this paper presents an auto-ethnography of living with smart home technology: a 20-month diary kept by one of the authors. The paper uses theories of practice to investigate details of learning processes when interacting with three selected technologies: smart alarm and lighting management, smart control of heating, and a smart electric vehicle (EV). Theories of learning have a well-established tradition within theories of practice, and the concept of "knowing how to go on" and the concept of practical intelligibility are central in this work. This paper investigates the adoption of new smart technologies and how they interact with learning processes in different material and social contexts. Such an approach can lay the groundwork for further empirical research with a broader set of materials. It can also provide knowledge to assist in the design of better technologies and in developing policies and regulations to promote this.
RESUMO
Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)-including critical reflections on what changing a society's relation to energy (efficiency) even means-have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence that can be produced. The agenda will be of use for both (1) those new to the energy-SSH field (including policyworkers), for learnings on the capabilities and capacities of energy-SSH, and (2) established energy-SSH researchers, for insights on the collectively held futures of energy-SSH research.
