International interview

1
International interview

• The Manchester-Lancaster approach to Bathrooms
  and Kitchens

2
Points for discussion

• Discussing KBs
• The Manchester/Lancaster approach
• Main claims/character
• Relation to transition theory
• Three level model
• Direction of innovation/change
• Interrelation between different levels
• Relation to sociological theories on agency and
  technology
• The future of the program
• (theory of) Environmental change
• International network

3
Discussing Kitchens and Bathrooms

• Silly stuff?
• Reducing complexity? Or Enhancing messy-ness
• Meaningful categories from everyday life
• Open to multi-disciplinary debates

4
The Manchester-Lancaster Approach

• Technology and Everyday Life
• Innovative Indeed
• Series of books and papers
• Fitting very well into emerging discussion on the
  need to theorize and organize transitions towards
  more sustainable food/energy/housing ways of life
• KBs as
• A Complex (technical) systems and innovation
  junctions
• B Locales for ordinary, routine everyday life
  practices

5
A KBs as complex systems, innovation junctions

• CCC-book as landmark
• Transition-theory/ three level model used to
• Define KBs at regime level
• Discuss situated character of domestic practices
• Discuss landscape-changes behind latest
  fashions
• Discuss direction of change/innovations
  bottom-up and/or top-down dependent from
  empirical domain?
• Discuss interrelation between different level
  processes and dynamics
• Allan/Elizabeth/Dale on time-space organization
  of everyday life against background of
  fluidization of modernity?

6
A Landscape changes

• How to be identified/named
• Work to Lifestyle kitchen?
• Bathing to Showering
• Collective to individualized consumption?
• Functional to esthetic/expressive?
• Stand-alone to integrated?
• Provision to Access?
• Environment as sobering to Sustainable
  Development as multi-dimensional extra quality?
• Multifunctional Space to functional specification
  to multiple spaces with multiple functions?

7
A Landscape changes

• How to be explained/ connected to wider social
  changes
• Norbert Elias on functionalization of spaces?
• Ulrich Beck on Hyper-individualization
• Jeremy Rifkin on the age of access
• Postmodern theory on the body?
• Mutual benefits from connecting KB-changes to
  these theories

8
B KBs as locales for ordinary, routine everyday
life practices

• Technology and Practice
• Large Technical System Approaches
• ANT-theory
• Flow-network theory
• Structuration theory, including Bourdieu
• Still to be developed into a more integrated
  perspective with its own name/brand?

9
B KBs as locales for ordinary, routine everyday
life practices

• Technologies and Practices dual approach
• Orchestration of demand Sunk meanings, fixed
  choices in the infrastructures of everyday life
  (deterministic ring to it)
• Appropriation of technologies as the active,
  gendered, skilful accomplishments that matter
  (voluntaristic agents)
• Specific dynamics of Change De- and
  re-routinization of long-estabished routines

10
The future of the program/ approach

• A Link up with theories on environmental change
  and policy
• B Further strengthen the international networks
  on this research
• C Develop also into quantitative methodology
  directions

11
A Link up with theories on environmental change
and policy

• (Dale) sets of green choices orchestrated and
  appropriated but also
• Studied best as clustered on the level of
  social practices
• Environmentally relevant
• Driven by ideas, desires, procedures
• Overall characteristics monitoring,
  monetarization, construction of green choice

12
A Link up with theories on environmental change
and policy (C)

• Constructing green choices a hierarchy of
  quality aspects framed in SD-language, matching
  the diversifying sets of consumer concerns for
  sustainable development worldwide

13
B International networks

• Build upon Lancaster network
• Use ISA/ESA and similar networks
• Link up with transition network?
• Develop European program on this?

14
International networks

• And please INVITE us again since it is INNOVATIVE
  and INTERESTING