Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

How can your domestic atmosphere be political?

Set against the context of the move to net or real zero and rising domestic heating costs. This paper proposes a speculative prototype to support us to reimagine the way we experience home. It presents research that draws on the method of Qualitative Secondary Data analysis (QSA) using existing qualitative oral history interview data transcripts and speculative design research. Based in the domestic, working with transcripts of oral histories of home heating in Sheffield, my analyses review interview data for traces of the Anthropocene. My explorations are imagining the ways heat moves through homes through time and this relationship to carbon and local and global temperatures. How do you feel in your home? This paper shares work in progress exploring and experimenting with the use of these existing qualitative data sets and speculative design fictions. These fictions take the form of speculative estate agent plans and property particulars which document the experiences, affect and atmosphere of home heating within homes’ histories. Atmospheres offer us a route to thinking about how to reconfigure some of the things that contribute to the way we feel, and as a result can help us move forwards towards a more inclusive or equitable futures. I ask you to consider what are the ways in which we can reconceptualise how our homes make us feel to support the move to real zero. Through these I draw on understandings of past human (and more-than-human) experiences to learn what home histories can offer us about future material practices of carbon and how these could support NetZero behaviour change.