Exploring sustainable practices with trigger-products: A case of staying warm at home

Heating of dwellings forms a significant portion of societies energy use and is increasing. One way of approaching the problem from a sustainable design point of view is to offer thermal comfort in a more energy efficient way. However, the idea of offering comfort to passive receptors (i.e. people) has been argued to be problematic for energy consumption on the long term, leading to lock-in infrastructures and shifting expectations of comfort conditions. Considering comfort as a highly variable social construct that can be achieved rather than offered shows opportunities for avoiding this increasingly demanding lock-in and relieving energy requirements for heating homes. A possible role for design then lies in offering people a variety of possibilities to achieve comfort. To unravel an abstract concept like comfort and to find opportunities for design in offering different ways of staying warm, a practice-oriented approach was used. Taking practices as a basic unit of analysis sheds light on both mundane daily activities and their social embedding. A study into current practices of staying warm at home, placed into a historic and wider cultural context, revealed opportunities for design. Over time, space heating is becoming the dominant practice in Dutch homes, while person heating practices are diminishing. A trigger-product study, aiming at understanding and involving people in the performance of person heating practices, investigated how these practices would work out in daily life. To further inform design and explore possibilities for intervention in heating practices, more research is needed into heat properties, hygiene and mobility issues