Emerging technologies’ impacts on ‘man caves’ and their energy demand

Abstract

Colloquially termed the ‘man cave’, the shed provides a conceptual lens for thinking about the home’s ‘edges rather than its centres’. This paper explores the implications for energy demand arising from the extension of existing and emerging technologies into these gendered ‘edges’ of the home. As well as considering sheds as physical sites, the paper draws on relational geographies of social practice to understand the peripheries of the property as important ‘doing-places’ for expanding activities. Three themes are discussed, drawn from an ethnographic study of 72 Australian households. First, the paper examines shed-doing-places for handiwork, home maintenance, hobbies and home charging, with opportunities to entrench and disrupt masculine associations with electric-powered technologies. Second, the paper identifies how the shed is becoming a masculine proving ground for smart and automated technologies, both outside and inside the main dwelling. Finally, the paper explores the shed as a secondary home centre for an expanded range of activities, infrastructures and technologies, which potentially challenge the shed’s traditional masculinity by making it accessible to others. The paper concludes by discussing the building, policy and research implications of these gendered edges’ changing role in relation to the centre of the home. <strong><em>Policy relevance</em></strong> Traditionally considered ‘non-habitable structures’, sheds and other peripheral structures on residential properties lack the energy and housing policy attention of dwellings, houses, consumers and households. This research demonstrates the increasing importance of these peripheral spaces as sites of consumption, gendered proving grounds for emerging (energy) technologies, home-based electric charging and secondary living spaces. Further, through a relational understanding of the shed, the paper identifies how the places traditionally provided by physical sheds may be shifting inside the home. Policy opportunities include efficiency renovation incentives and demand management programmes targeting peripheral sites of consumption, which may be more or less flexible than other sites and activities. Additionally, the gendered dynamics associated with sheds and the technologies reveals important insights about how to engage with households as they embed or reject smart, automated and energy technologies into their everyday lives.