Energy in Everyday Practice

Abstract

It is time to put the smart ontology to one side, and introduce another possible reality (or series of realities) for smart energy technologies in everyday life. This chapter depicts an ontology of everyday practice in which people who consume energy are repositioned as performers of everyday practices, who are in turn enrolled in realising, or undermining, the aims of the Smart Utopia. This is an ontology in which social order and change are grounded in the routines and dynamics of day-to-day living, where people consume energy by undertaking everyday practices such as cooking, cleaning, bathing, cooling and entertaining. In developing this position I pay particular attention to the ontological status of energy and the infrastructures and technologies that make and mediate it. I am interested in how energy, along with the technologies that deliver it to the home and that it in turn powers, can be thought of as material elements of practice, or part of a practice’s composition. I begin this discussion with a brief and final departure from the smart ontology by outlining the ways in which everyday life is commonly dismissed from the Smart Utopia, where it is inadvertently and implicitly framed as dumb and disorderly behaviour.