"The project examines the relationship between climate change, conventions of thermal comfort and the built environment"

Future Comforts
Researchers

Dr Elizabeth Shove



Elizabeth Shove is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has been responsible for a number of research projects relating to energy use, consumption and practice and is author of A Sociology of Energy, Buildings and the Environment (with Simon Guy), and of Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the Social Organization of Normality. She co-ordinated a five-year programme of workshops and summer schools on 'Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability' and is now involved in a number of projects that have to do with the relation between ordinary technologies, routines, habits and practices.

Heather Chappells



Heather Chappells is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has worked as a research associate on projects including: "Smart Metering and Sustainable Cities" (Newcastle University, EPSRC, 1996-1998) and "Domestic Consumption and Utility Services" (Lancaster University, EU, 1997-2000). Heather was co-ordinator of a workshop on "Infrastructures, Consumption and the Environment", funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF), and in 1999/2001 co-organised ESF summer schools on "Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability". Her current research interests focus on the restructuring of infrastructure networks and the social and technical construction of demand.

Future comforts: re-conditioning urban environments
By Dr. Elizabeth Shove and Heather Chappells 

The following text is an excerpt from Future Comforts

Vast quantities of energy are required to heat or cool buildings to provide what are now regarded as acceptable standards of thermal comfort. Paradoxically, likely responses to global warming, such as greater reliance on air-conditioning, threaten to increase energy demand and emissions of CO₂ and exacerbate rather than mitigate climate change. This project examines the link between global warming and the technologies and conventions of indoor environmental management. Starting from the proposition that concepts of comfort are socially and technically constructed, it examines the ambitions and approaches of practitioners and policy makers currently involved in specifying the indoor climates of the future. What assumptions of human ‘need’ are constructed and embedded in the built environment and with what consequences for conventions of ‘normality’ and associated patterns of resource intensity? The research, which involves a review of relevant literature, interviews and interaction with key actors (in the UK), is designed to engender and inform academic and non-academic debate about the future of the indoor climate and the ways of life associated with it. The goal is to consider how comfort might be defined and achieved under changing climatic conditions but in ways that do not exacerbate recognised environmental problems.

Questions of thermal comfort have been addressed by building scientists, urban planners, social scientists, historians and anthropologists but there has been no concerted effort to bring these lines of enquiry together or to analyse the different perspectives on offer. The three stages of the project contribute to the development of a more interdisciplinary approach. The first step is to collate and analyse literature on the history, specification and provision of thermal comfort, to review different perspectives and lines of enquiry and take stock of the social and technical issues at stake. The second step is to record the views of property developers, manufacturers, research scientists, utility managers and regulators currently involved in shaping the future of comfort in the UK. Interviews with practitioners will help locate, compare, and better understand the ambitions and expectations of those in a position to influence the co-evolution of comfort-related technology and practice. The third step is to organise a workshop in which relevant interest groups, identified during the previous stages of the project, come together to consider the definition and provision of comfortable conditions within the built environment.

In focusing on the social and technical construction and transformation of thermal comfort this project promises to make an important contribution to debates about human activity, urban systems and environmental change. Specifically the project will:

• Engender and inform research and debate about climate change, comfort, and the future of the indoor environment.
   

• Review the ambitions and perspectives of those in a position to influence the social and technical specification and provision of comfort and patterns of energy demand.
   

• Build an interdisciplinary research agenda spanning building and social science and involving historians, anthropologists, architects, planners and engineers.

"Our point is that the ability to make oneself comfortable involves an incredible amount of effort, much of which involves processes outside of the home itself and is not reducible to an individual effort. Further the provision of comfort draws in a cross-disciplinary array of experts each focusing on different aspects of human-environment-building interactions – including physiologists, psychologists, architects, engineers and anthropologists. We now consider the ways in which this medley of thermal comfort researchers have conceptualised comfort and reflect back on how their different approaches relate to underpinning assumptions about the environment and the home."