It is exciting to be starting the interviews for our DEMAND Research project on everyday life and energy use. I always learn so much from speaking to people about their lives and experiences – and in this project hope to find participants with quite different household types, professions and working patterns (including retirement/unemployment), leisure activities and class backgrounds. I’ll be speaking to people about how they coordinate their activities and their use of energy services like heating.

It was good fun trying to stage photos that would help suggest the kind of coordination dynamics we are interested in discussing. After some experiments and discussion, here is the result:

More information about the project and what participation involves can also be found here: Household research study participant information

Update: 13 July 2017

Many thanks to all of the people who have already participated in this research – it has been really helpful to hear about your experiences.

I am still hoping to learn more about a few specific types of experiences:

• People whose coordination is affected by tight finances
• People who regularly take part in weekday (Mon-Fri) religious activities
• People who have at least one child aged 10+
• People who have adult children (19+) still living at home
• Someone living in a shared house

If you are interested in speaking with me about any of these experiences, please get in touch!

While my blogging on this website has taken a backseat to other tasks in the last year, there are two recent developments on other sites that might be of interest.

Firstly, I recently contributed a guest post to the Centre for Mobilities Research blog discussing the recent 10th Anniversary special issue that James Faulconbridge and I co-edited. The special issue itself is also fantastic and I would certainly encourage people to explore the range of diverse papers within it.

Secondly, Hilmar Schäfer and I have developed a new blog in the hopes of encouraging ongoing discussion about the implications of practice theories for methodologies. We have come up with a series of propositions to get conversation started and will be having guest posts from a range of theorists and researchers who have developed practice theory or made use of it in empirical studies. There will be a panel at the upcoming DEMAND International Conference dedicated to furthering discussions, and we encourage anyone who is interested in joining the conversation to read, comment, and get in touch about submitting your own post.