Yolande Strengers
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 109568 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Yolande Strengers |
| PRENOMES | Yolande |
| SOBRENOME | Strengers |
| ASSINATURA | STRENGERS Y |
| AFILIAÇÕES | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5664-621X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 415 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 54 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Towards a good (enough) life
Everyday lives of young people are made difficult by high costs of living, housing and environmental crises but there is sparse academic literature that examines the ways in which this group navigates financial pressures and environmental concerns. This article revisits the concept of thrift in the context of contemporary challenges and reveals its place and significance in daily practices of young Australians. Drawing on visits at participants’ …
Future schools and the energy implications of AI in education
‘School of the future’ scenarios remain a popular means of animating policy, industry and public debates around issues relating to technological, economic, societal and environmental change. To date, these scenarios rarely involve the perspectives of school students. Purpose of the research: This study explores how scenarios can be used to engage school children in futures thinking, particularly regarding the uncertainties surrounding artificial …
We'd rather have a clean planet than anything else”
The increasing uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) presents both opportunities and challenges for the future electricity grid. Managing the uncertainties associated with EV uptake, charging routines, and household energy consumption patterns is crucial for grid operators to ensure stability and efficiency. This study responds to the prevalent belief within the energy industry that in lieu of effective time-of-use (TOU) tariffs and price-based incen…
We’re already experts in school, right
Automation in electric vehicle futures
In this article we consider how people will live with the automated features of electric vehicles (EVs) in possible futures.We complicate dominant industry and government narratives which: envisage EVs as part of future fully automated systems -involving remote or wireless EV charging, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home electricity systems; and see these moves as driving a transition to decarbonisation, renewable energy and environmental sustain…
Non-energy feedback
Energy feedback is a central plank in demand management interventions aiming to reduce the quantity or shift the timing of domestic energy use – changes to patterns of consumption widely seen as necessary in energy systems powered by intermittent renewable generation. Despite significant resources and attention, however, the changes in consumption achieved to date through energy feedback have been relatively limited in both extent and duration. A…
Getting beyond Net Zero dashboards in the information technology sector
This perspective is inspired by current affairs in corporate social responsibility reporting in large technology companies, specifically the deployment of new software services to track carbon emissions in pursuit of Net Zero commitments. Drawing on first-hand observation of this practice over several years of employment in a US multinational firm, we focus on the carbon emissions dashboard as a representative example of key problems with the dom…
Healthy, safe and comfortable
Health concerns regarding indoor air quality are leading to greater uptake of air purification technologies internationally, alongside the continuing normalisation of air conditioning. With thermal comfort largely considered separately from air quality, the energy sector risks inadequately preparing for the emergence of new indoor air practices and associated ‘needs’. Conceptually grounded in theories of social practice and design anthropological…
Future notification
In a post-pandemic context, everyday life, technology and media have become increasingly focused in the home. This has implications for how people will live with automated and smart technologies in possible futures, for electricity demand, transition to net zero emissions and ultimately planetary health. Here, we explore these unfolding circumstances through the prism of notifications, and their capacity to mediate uncertainties while enabling pe…
Bringing energy futures to life
More work for Big Mother
The home is an ever-changing assemblage of technologies that shapes the organisation and division of housework and supports certain models of what that work entails, who does it and for what purposes. This paper analyses core tensions arising through the ways smart homes are embedding logics of digital capitalism into home life and labour. As a critical way of understanding these techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction, we adv…
Resource Man and the Smart Wife
research-article Share on Resource Man and the Smart Wife: Implications for Sustainability in the Home Author: Yolande Strengers Monash University Monash UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 30Issue 2March - April 2023pp 36–40https://doi.org/10.1145/3582566Published:28 February 2023Publication History 0citation308DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads308Last 12 Months308Last 6 weeks25 Get Citation AlertsNew Cit…
Automated and absent
Industry builds energy scenarios to help plan and prepare for future uncertainties. Scenarios are a key mechanism for mobilising shared socio-technical imaginations to directly inform future-making and have very real implications for the energy system today. Whose visions and objectives are incorporated into them, and what assumptions they hold, are crucial to understanding the form that futures take. The components included in scenario building …
Building plausible scenarios for future living
Current energy scenario-building techniques often overlook the influence of lifestyles, emerging non-energy technology, and household preferences on energy use. This oversight results in an overreliance on assumptions about individuals to contextualise quantitative energy consumption patterns and speculations on energy technology adoption, tariff responses, and automation acceptance. In response to this gap, this paper presents an innovative mixe…
Design anthropological foresighting
This article introduces design anthropological foresighting. It does so through the example of automated futures and demonstrates how this approach can be applied to investigate, understand and reframe dominant assumptions about how people will live with emerging technologies and energy systems in possible futures. In doing so we: outline the theoretical and methodological principles of design anthropological foresighting, and the implications th…
AI at Home
This article makes the case for considering conversational AI devices a critical urban challenge, particularly as the home gains importance in everyday life. Drawing on excerpts from conversations with Alexa – the market-leading digital voice assistant designed and manufactured by Amazon – the article illustrates how this device’s friendly feminine personality masks significant environmental and gender effects. Building on the author’s ongoing re…
Co-Presence and Contingency
Recent interest in futures anthropology has argued that the discipline should play a more active role in shaping futures. However, this raises methodological problems for accessing futures and recreating the co-presence that is central to ethnography. Studying automated futures is particularly challenging because of the strong visions of technology-led futures, which rely on solutionist narratives and fail to account for everyday life. This artic…
Energy, emerging technologies and gender in homes
HIGHLIGHTS This special issue explores a key question in the energy transition: how are visions, relationships and practices with emerging technologies gendered, and what does this mean for home relations and energy outcomes? Homes are deeply gendered spaces where labour, care, technology management and household responsibilities are unequally distributed. Yet, as the papers in this special issue reveal, policy and industry visions tend to overlo…
Emerging technologies’ impacts on ‘man caves’ and their energy demand
Colloquially termed the 'man cave', the shed provides a conceptual lens for thinking about the home's 'edges rather than its centres'. This paper explores the implications for energy demand arising from the extension of existing and emerging technologies into these gendered 'edges' of the home. As well as considering sheds as physical sites, the paper draws on relational geographies of social practice to understand the peripheries of the property…
Playing games with the weather
This article examines the potential of a novel card game method designed to provide insights into connections between mundane everyday practices and renewable energy generation. The method was developed as part of an ethnographic project exploring Australian householders’ experiences of weather and climate and evaluating their impacts on everyday practices and localised energy production. The card game drew inspiration from other similar methods …
Design Ethnography
Smart Home Masculinities
Existing research has shown dominant smart home imaginaries to be gendered visions of technologically deterministic lives of affluent young white men and middle-class hetero-normative white cultures. Instead, we argue, a more realistic, plausible and ethical approach to smart home design needs to originate from the different starting point of gender diversity and equality in the home. To demonstrate this, we situate smart home design within the d…
Personalization and the Smart Home
Smart home futures predicted and promoted in the discourses and practices of industry increasingly figure forms of automated decision making (ADM) into existing narratives of technological solutionism. This article interrogates how these narratives are constituted, the futures they imagine, predict and promote, and how people and households are presented within these futures. Our discussion is based on a content analysis of technology industry re…
Automation, wellbeing and Digital Voice Assistants
Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) like Google Home provide automated news, media and other content directly into the home. In this article, we outline how Google Home’s content delivery can support the wellbeing and independence of older people. We argue that automated media provided by DVAs enrols older people in a dialectic relationship with the automated content and feminised conversation they deliver, uniquely performed within people’s own ever…
Digital technology and energy imaginaries of future home life
The global migration of everyday life
Smart energy futures and social practice imaginaries
Convenience and energy consumption in the smart home of the future
Negotiating everyday life
Trials and evaluations of energy and water consumption feedback are premised on understandings of consumption as a rational and individual decision-making process. This article draws on two alternative conceptualizations of consumption to understand the role and effectiveness of consumption feedback delivered through an in-home display (IHD). The first considers how consumption is mediated by socio-technical systems of energy and water provision,…
Smart home technologies in everyday life
Curious energy consumers
In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household’s energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consu…
Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices
Aesthetic pleasures and gendered tech-work in the 21st-century smart home
This article analyses visions of everyday life embedded in the 21st-century smart home, specifically the promoted aspiration to generate escalated aesthetic pleasures or 'pleasance', attained through automated and connected devices. We explore the likely outcomes and effects of this vision, drawing on our international content analysis of magazine and online articles and semi-structured interview and tours with households who live in smart homes …
Peak demand and the ‘family peak’ period in Australia
Digital technology and energy imaginaries of future home life
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
Adapting to 'extreme' weather
Recent climate change adaptation policy positions previously mundane weather events, such as heatwaves and coldsnaps, as increasingly dangerous. Within this discourse of 'extreme' weather, the health sector is promoting climate-controlled indoor environments as a sensible coping strategy. Such responses mask our constant and ongoing adaptations to weather, which are becoming more dynamic and varied in mobile and globalised societies. In this pape…
Smart Home Masculinities
Existing research has shown dominant smart home imaginaries to be gendered visions of technologically deterministic lives of affluent young white men and middle-class hetero-normative white cultures. Instead, we argue, a more realistic, plausible and ethical approach to smart home design needs to originate from the different starting point of gender diversity and equality in the home. To demonstrate this, we situate smart home design within the d…
Meeting in the Global Workplace
In the highly connected and globalised corporate workplace, face-to-face communication is persisting and expanding, despite significant advances and investments in telecommunication. Drawing on interviews with 34 employees from an Australian company trying to reduce air travel associated with business meetings, this paper reveals how telepresence facilitates distinctly different practices of meeting and collaborating to those enabled by face-to-f…
Bringing energy futures to life
More work for Big Mother
The home is an ever-changing assemblage of technologies that shapes the organisation and division of housework and supports certain models of what that work entails, who does it and for what purposes. This paper analyses core tensions arising through the ways smart homes are embedding logics of digital capitalism into home life and labour. As a critical way of understanding these techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction, we adv…
Design anthropological foresighting
This article introduces design anthropological foresighting. It does so through the example of automated futures and demonstrates how this approach can be applied to investigate, understand and reframe dominant assumptions about how people will live with emerging technologies and energy systems in possible futures. In doing so we: outline the theoretical and methodological principles of design anthropological foresighting, and the implications th…
Beyond demand management
This paper highlights the problems and assumptions ingrained in dominant demand-management programmes designed to address issues of erratic household energy consumption, urban water shortages and increasing peak electricity demand. It begins by highlighting the problematic divide between energy and water production and the seemingly separate sphere of consumption. This divide fails to consider the ways in which consumption shapes, and is shaped b…
Robotic vacuum cleaners save energy? Raising cleanliness conventions and energy demand in Australian households with smart home technologies
Studying social practices and global practice change using scrapbooks as a cultural probe
Empirical work on household consumption informed by theories of social practice has grown exponentially in the last few years. This is partly due to conceptual developments positing practices as being comprised of materials, meanings and skills. Such formulations are readily applied to empirical investigations. As the aim of a growing body of empirical work with theories of social practice is to present evidence for how practices can, should, hav…
Energy, emerging technologies and gender in homes
HIGHLIGHTS This special issue explores a key question in the energy transition: how are visions, relationships and practices with emerging technologies gendered, and what does this mean for home relations and energy outcomes? Homes are deeply gendered spaces where labour, care, technology management and household responsibilities are unequally distributed. Yet, as the papers in this special issue reveal, policy and industry visions tend to overlo…
Policing and polluting
Interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration in doctoral candidature
Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the author's experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on candidates and their supervisors in interdisciplinary and industry collaborative environments in the humaniti…
Automation in electric vehicle futures
In this article we consider how people will live with the automated features of electric vehicles (EVs) in possible futures.We complicate dominant industry and government narratives which: envisage EVs as part of future fully automated systems -involving remote or wireless EV charging, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home electricity systems; and see these moves as driving a transition to decarbonisation, renewable energy and environmental sustain…
Non-energy feedback
Energy feedback is a central plank in demand management interventions aiming to reduce the quantity or shift the timing of domestic energy use – changes to patterns of consumption widely seen as necessary in energy systems powered by intermittent renewable generation. Despite significant resources and attention, however, the changes in consumption achieved to date through energy feedback have been relatively limited in both extent and duration. A…
Housing, heat stress and health in a changing climate
In many places extreme heat causes more deaths than floods, cyclones and bushfires. However, efforts to manage the health implications of heat and increase the adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations are in their infancy, requiring urgent attention from research and policy. This paper presents a case for research exploring the influence of social and contextual factors on vulnerable populations' capacity to adapt to heat in the context of cli…
Negotiating everyday life
Trials and evaluations of energy and water consumption feedback are premised on understandings of consumption as a rational and individual decision-making process. This article draws on two alternative conceptualizations of consumption to understand the role and effectiveness of consumption feedback delivered through an in-home display (IHD). The first considers how consumption is mediated by socio-technical systems of energy and water provision,…
Beyond demand management
This paper highlights the problems and assumptions ingrained in dominant demand-management programmes designed to address issues of erratic household energy consumption, urban water shortages and increasing peak electricity demand. It begins by highlighting the problematic divide between energy and water production and the seemingly separate sphere of consumption. This divide fails to consider the ways in which consumption shapes, and is shaped b…
Peak electricity demand and social practice theories
Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices
The global migration of everyday life
Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life
This book interrogates the global utopian vision for smart energy technologies and the new energy consumer intended to realise it. It enriches and extends the possibilities of four residential smart s
Smart energy in everyday life
research-article Free Access Share on Smart energy in everyday life: are you designing for resource man? Author: Yolande Strengers RMIT University RMIT UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 21Issue 4July + August 2014 pp 24–31https://doi.org/10.1145/2621931Published:01 July 2014Publication History 133citation4,261DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations133Total Downloads4,261Last 12 Months1,253Last 6 weeks294 Get Citation AlertsN…
Curious energy consumers
In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household’s energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consu…
Interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration in doctoral candidature
Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the author's experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on candidates and their supervisors in interdisciplinary and industry collaborative environments in the humaniti…
Peak demand and the ‘family peak’ period in Australia
Meeting in the Global Workplace
In the highly connected and globalised corporate workplace, face-to-face communication is persisting and expanding, despite significant advances and investments in telecommunication. Drawing on interviews with 34 employees from an Australian company trying to reduce air travel associated with business meetings, this paper reveals how telepresence facilitates distinctly different practices of meeting and collaborating to those enabled by face-to-f…
Policing and polluting
Careful Surveillance at Play
Heatwaves, cooling and young children at home
Convenience and energy consumption in the smart home of the future
Adapting to 'extreme' weather
Recent climate change adaptation policy positions previously mundane weather events, such as heatwaves and coldsnaps, as increasingly dangerous. Within this discourse of 'extreme' weather, the health sector is promoting climate-controlled indoor environments as a sensible coping strategy. Such responses mask our constant and ongoing adaptations to weather, which are becoming more dynamic and varied in mobile and globalised societies. In this pape…
Beyond Threshold Approaches to Extreme Heat
One of climate change’s most certain impacts is increasingly frequent and extreme heat. Heat management and climate adaptation policies generally utilize temperature and humidity thresholds to identify what constitute “extreme” conditions. In the workplace, such thresholds can be used to trigger reductions in work intensity and/or duration. In regions that routinely exceed proposed thresholds, however, this approach can be deeply problematic and …
Robotic vacuum cleaners save energy? Raising cleanliness conventions and energy demand in Australian households with smart home technologies
Smart home technologies in everyday life
Studying social practices and global practice change using scrapbooks as a cultural probe
Empirical work on household consumption informed by theories of social practice has grown exponentially in the last few years. This is partly due to conceptual developments positing practices as being comprised of materials, meanings and skills. Such formulations are readily applied to empirical investigations. As the aim of a growing body of empirical work with theories of social practice is to present evidence for how practices can, should, hav…
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
Smart energy futures and social practice imaginaries
Aesthetic pleasures and gendered tech-work in the 21st-century smart home
This article analyses visions of everyday life embedded in the 21st-century smart home, specifically the promoted aspiration to generate escalated aesthetic pleasures or 'pleasance', attained through automated and connected devices. We explore the likely outcomes and effects of this vision, drawing on our international content analysis of magazine and online articles and semi-structured interview and tours with households who live in smart homes …
Dynamic Non-humans in a Changing World
Sociology (40 obras) · Computer Science (37 obras) · Political science (33 obras) · Business (30 obras) · Engineering (28 obras) · Everyday life (17 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (16 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Public relations (16 obras)