Abstract
This article presents the process and results of a practice-based intervention aimed at facilitating the time and space required to experiment with and change home heating in households, to promote socially and environmentally sustainable ways of practising thermal comfort. A central feature of the intervention, called ENERGISE Living Labs and conducted across eight European countries, was that social practices were targeted, resulting in a focus on what ‘heating is for’ rather than the process of heating in and of itself. In this article, we concentrate on the three countries with the highest reported expectations of thermal comfort and describe how 113 households in Denmark, Finland and Hungary completed a set of challenges to reduce their indoor temperature to 18 °C for four weeks in the late autumn of 2018. To facilitate alternative ways of keeping warm, the participants were supported by reflexive interviews and group discussions, and aided by tips and materials. The results demonstrate how changes in skills, competences, norms, and expectations related to indoor thermal comfort (in addition to other daily practices) are essential for more sufficient energy use. Generally, the temperature level at which people felt comfortable was reduced by an average of 1 °C, and, more importantly, participants became aware of their heating-related practices, including the underlying elements of these practices, and learned how to challenge them. The results clearly indicate the potential of practice-based interventions to promote deliberation on and change in existing socially shared expectations of comfort.
Highlights
In Europe, home heating accounts for a significant proportion of both household energy and total energy use
We describe the changes in indoor temperatures in relation to shifts in practices of keeping warm (Sections 4.1 and 4.2) and changes in the meaning and skills of keeping warm, the complexities of material and infrastructural arrangements for keeping warm as well as changes to notions of remaining comfortable (Sections 4.3–4.5)
Our results show that collectively established indoor temperature standards (Wilhite, 2008, and as discussed in Section 2) played a strong role in the understanding of desirable indoor temperatures prior to the intervention
Summary
In Europe, home heating accounts for a significant proportion of both household energy and total energy use. We refer to mundane, habitual perfor mances of everyday actions guided by shared norms and conventions, skills and competences, as well as materials and technologies (e.g., Gram-Hanssen, 2011; Shove, 2003; Warde, 2005). To answer this question, we use data from ENERGISE Living Labs (ELLs) – a practice-based intervention aimed at challenging mundane practices and thereby supporting the normalisation of less resource-intensive al ternatives (Vadovics and Goggins, 2019). Compared with technology- or behaviour-oriented approaches, which often do not fully engage with practices or meet the requirements in relation to energy savings (see Kuijer and Bakker, 2015), practice-based interventions hold novel potential for shifting mundane energy use to wards sustainability (Laakso et al, 2021)
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