Conceptions of Innovation and Practice: Designing Indoor Climate

While moving between homes, institutions and offices people come to know indoor climate as lived experience. Along the way through a history of opening and closing windows, doors, turning thermostats for radiators, air conditioners, towel rails and under floor heating on and off, putting clothes on and taking them off, coping with breakdowns in heating, ventilation and water systems, doing something about drafts and where possible trying to find ways of conserving energy. These ‘incidents and encounters en route’ involve responding to other people and things within continually changing environments (Ingold 2011:154). Knowing thus comes through movements ‘in the passage from place to place and the changing horizons along the way’ (ibid, Ingold 2000: 227). In this way what people come to know about indoor climate is not about correlating levels of physical factors such as temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration. Rather, ‘Lying at the confluence of actions and responses, they are identified not by their intrinsic attributes but by the memories they call up. Thus things are not classified like facts or tabulated like data, but narrated like stories’ (Ingold 2011:154). Importantly, these stories do not encode instructions, they describe a rhythmic process. Comfort here has a temporal dimension. People negotiate old sensors and old technological models while being at home, in the kindergarten or in the office implying both people and technologies have life histories. They become old over time.