6. Invisible Elements of Home Heating
6.3 Implications of Invisible Elements
By showing that there are invisible elements in the formation of home heating practices I have demonstrated that there is agency beyond place and ‘place-making’
and that households can adapt and modify existing individual elements in their own right. Occupants can bring unique configurations to movement that is central to how improvisation unfolds in real time. On the one hand, the modification of individual elements implies that unique configurations should not be thought of separately from their physical and material environment but rather as an ‘open’ place and an environment constituted on interrelated flows (Pink and Leder Mackley: 2015).
Therefore, ‘place-making’ in the home implies that domestic environments and indoor climates are always in the process of becoming, as they undergo continuous generation. And in the process of continuous generation, occupants not only bring unique configurations into existence, but they also engage with the contingencies of their home environments by simultaneously creating and being part of indoor climates. In this sense, occupants are not just “carriers of practices” (Schatzki: 2001), but are also active and corresponding agents who cope with new and challenging situations. They are able to learn, navigate and renew the performance of home heating practices by “threading their way through” lines of movement and improvisation (Ingold: 2010). And because occupants are able to connect and bind various elements into movement, they are also able to renew home heating practices to make, remake and modify the spatial and temporal words they inhabit.
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The ability to modify and renew home heating practices through various individual and often invisible elements suggests that creativity does not necessarily have a linear relationship with improvisation and innovation. Irregular uses of radiators and TRVs unfold from a field of emergent and processual relationships between the body and its physical environment. Improvisation therefore becomes a co-constructive process between the sensory aesthetics of the home, occupants’ sensory experiences, indoor climates, physical characteristics of the building and the condition of the heating system and radiators. Moreover, as Hallam and Ingold (2007) point out, innovation characterises creativity and modification backwards rather than forward. They also note that life and ‘place-making’ are about ‘keeping going’ rather than repetition, because occupants mingle with the world, and creativity is inseparable from the total mixes of relations into which it is embedded and into which it extends. Therefore, creativity is not necessarily synonymous with the ‘new’; rather, it is a process and a ‘product’ of alignment, adjustment and modification. The merging of elements and processes, as well as the generative character of ‘place-making’, implies that nothing that people do repeats exactly the same way, and all routines involve a certain degree of improvisation. Home environments are relentlessly on the move, and this constant change brings about shifts and alterations through the recombination of elements and renewal of performances.
Occupants actively redefine radiator use and TRV control based on their own needs, perceptions, sensory experiences and the problem-solving task at hand. Modification therefore involves a degree of experimentation, sensing, thinking and developing plans. Furthermore, it does not replicate scripted practices; rather, it is a process of renewal and aligns movements because occupants are always immersed in material, domestic, sensory and physical flows. And because they are immersed, they bring a unique relation to the movement they create.
Creativity is often considered to shift between skills someone is blessed with or a particular skill someone is being taught. However, creativity and the ability to improvise are not only traits of exceptionally gifted individuals who can demonstrate the ability to create something radically novel and extraordinary – creativity can be located in the mundane, because it is created through the way people engage in their everyday activities and it becomes part of the way humanity operates (Sawyer:
2000). Consequently, improvisation in home heating can be understood as an aspect
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of functioning and a way of manoeuvring through the everyday. It is an ongoing process of how life unfolds day by day, because it is a constantly emerging practice that is inseparable from the fabric of the everyday. Consequently, creative engagement with technologies is always responsive to the surrounding material, sensory, domestic and physical flows. Therefore, occupants improvise their way through a field of relationships rather than repeating the performance of the exact same practice. And this brings me to the last point, namely that technological change is inherently uncertain, because improvisation is always integrative of the surrounding environment and it is characterised by relationality between the internal and external environment of the body besides receptivity, awareness and responsiveness. As De Spain expresses:
“When you turn your awareness in toward yourself, you come into contact with a mélange of flesh and breadth and mind and desire and everything else that resides in there. When, instead you turn your senses out toward the world around you, you find yourself bathing in unending stimulation from the space and people and sound and energies that compose the life beyond your skin. Then there is the connection, the interaction, the blurry melding of the inside and the outside when the conceptual walls that separate and delineate who we are and who we are not becomes porous.
Surely, the infinite potential of these realms provides a lifetime of resources from which to improvise”
(De Spain 2014: 81).
Technological changes in home heating are therefore inseparable from the ‘place-event’ of the home and the ever-shifting constellation of domestic environments. And the development of creative engagements with technologies in domestic environments is inevitable, because they are core to the way in which humanity operates. The mingling up of relationships between the material, sensory, domestic and physical environments makes the development of new practices un-scriptable.
As Ingold puts it:
“[…] life is not contained within things, nor is it transported about. It is rather laid down along paths of movement, of action and perception. Every living being, accordingly, grows and reaches out into the environment along the sum of its paths.
To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never
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quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world are the very threads from which the living world is woven” (Ingold 2011: 242).
By looking into the individual and invisible elements of home heating we have seen that people are in a process of ongoing engagement with their surrounding environment. They thread ‘subjective’ elements into home heating, radiator use and TRV control, and b threading these invisible elements they are able to connect to new practices. Additionally, by connecting to new practices they can modify and bring into existence alternatives that otherwise would not have come into existence.
Modification and renewal are therefore not only intrinsic to how day-to-day life unfolds but, as I have shown, are relational, generative and forward-moving.
Conclusion
By drawing on data from home video tours in four households, and IR imaging in one household, I have introduced multisensory emplaced learning and a set of individual elements to understand how occupants engage in the performance of improvisatory home heating in the actual moment of movement. I have continued to demonstrate that domestic environments and home heating are not made up exclusively of stable routines. Home heating can be irregular, ad-hoc and improvisatory in character.
Occupants’ improvisation is a unique movement, because it is integrative of the surrounding physical environment. Moreover, it is a creative engagement, because occupants all have a unique relationship with the movement they create. The process of attuning shows that improvisation can be characterised by multisensory emplaced learning. In addition, there is a shifting awareness between the body and its surrounding material and physical environment. The elements of hybrid cultural identity, childhood memory, health risk perception, knowledge of scientific facts and resourcefulness have demonstrated that occupants can draw on individual and more
‘subjective’ elements to connect to practices through movement. We have learnt that improvisation and the development of new practices can bring into existence a gap
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between the intended and actual use of radiators or TRVs, but practices that bring the gap into existence are outcomes of complex and relational processes.
Improvisation in home heating is also a form of dialogue between the body and its surrounding physical and material environment. It is simultaneously in tune with the senses and an active composition of the senses, and it involves reading and tracking spatial and indoor climate qualities, perceptions and interpretations of environmental stimuli, dealing with constraints and limitations of imposed ready-made designs and the interplay of creativity and planning. Moreover, I have argued that improvisation is uncertain and is therefore an unavoidable dimension of technological and social change in the ‘place-event’ of the home. Nonetheless, it is more than risk or the unpredictability of human action; rather, it is reflective of a modification, an alignment and a renewal that is generative and forward-moving. And in the next chapter, I argue further that improvisation, modification and alignment are core to the fabric of the everyday and they can be a source of sustainable change. Ultimately, they are a communicative medium that is an important site for co-design processes.
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