The Role of Everyday Life Products and Social Practices in Sustainable Transitions

Attention has for long been on developing new devices for both cooking, cleaning and leisure continuously giving consumers more choices, in trying to save time and make everyday life more convenient. Thus, there seem to be a close relation between an increasing variety of energy using products and the way we live. When opting for a low carbon society, the innovation dynamics of everyday life products as well as consumption and practice patterns become an important field of investigation. Hence, to approach consumption aspects of using and interacting with energy using products, it is important to understand what practices the products are a part of when in use. According to Røpke (2009) “Primarily, people are practitioners who indirectly, through the performance of various practices, draw on resources”. Therefore, in order to make consumers aware of their actions in an environmental perspective, the environmental impacts of their practice has to become “visible” when applying different products. Thus, if a certain practice has severe environmental impacts, it may not help just changing the products. Routines connected to the use of the product may also need to be changed. However, practices are hard to kill (Røpke, 2009), so in order to make people change practice, alternate routines that work has to be proposed and accepted. Practice theory can help understanding how practices work, and thus clarifying what has to be included in a study of potentials for a sustainable transition.Social practices and the aspect of consumers being practitioners is an interesting subject to investigate further in relation to Geels’ Multi Level Perspective (MLP) on technological transitions. As the role of user practices in system change seems to be neglected in the MLP of transitions (Genus and Coles, 2008), analyzing practices around the use of energy using products may contribute to an elaboration of transition theory. Although Genus and Coles may not be referring to practices of daily life as such, it may be useful as well to include, as daily consumption are an important aspect of socio-technical regimes, which constitute the meso-level in the MLP framework. This may contribute to clarification of the contribution and interaction of various groups at different analytical levels and thus contribute to the operationalization of the MLP framework, which are requested by some critics (Cole and Genus, 2008).