Making Homes by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Moving through the home in practice

In this and the following sections we approach moving through the home from two perspectives. First, here we return to our discussions of bedtime routines and lighting, developed in Chapters 2 and 3, in order to show how these routines of movement pull together elements of different everyday practices of home. Our point here is to show that moving through the home can be treated both in the context of research design and analytically as a ‘thread’ through which to gain understandings of how people live in their homes and how different elements of everyday life are bound together in the forward moving dynamics through which the complex ecologies of things, persons and processes become configured into and disperse from clusters of intensity within the flow of the everyday. Second, in the following sections we focus in on the use of everyday ‘practices’ as entry points into other people’s world. However, unlike much existing research that tends to be interested in understanding the dynamics of these practices themselves, we focus on how we might understand them as situated within routines of movement through the home, which involve the flows of people, things, fresh air, warmth, energy, water and many other tangible and intangible elements of home. To demonstrate the latter we next focus on the example of cooking-related activities.

In our articles and presentations one of the key activities in the home that we have discussed based on our own research is the way people move around in their homes at night-time on their way to bed. Here we bring this example to the fore again for a particular purpose, to emphasize how movement through the home as part of specific routines can offer us ways to understand how key sets of activities are pulled together into routines, so that they become inextricable from each other. As we have seen in Chapter 2 such routines are forward moving in that they are future-focused and involve transitions into the night-time, which are also orientated towards ensuring that people can move on into the next day. This discussion also picks up some key themes from Chapter 3, in that we see how transition to the night-time home is also an activity in the making and experience of a particular atmosphere of home, while moving through.

In Chapter 3, Figure 3.6, we show a still image from one of our LEEDR videos (video 28 at www.energyanddigitalliving.com), captured from a night-time routine re-enactment. This image is of an area of the participant’s living room before the lights were switched off. This particular participant’s downstairs routine was quite typical of that of a family household with animals and children. Stephen, who lived with his wife and youngest son (with occasional visits from adult children), began his re-enactment in the living room. He showed us how he moved through the room, switching off lights and technologies, and opening the door into the garden to let the dog out and back in again. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.