Sustaining comfort practices 29everyday practices and routines. It is, therefore, helpful to consider how non-air-
con comfort practices disappear, why habits and routines change, and why the
material culture of everyday life alters as modes of comfort provision change. To
approach such topics and questions, recent debates around social practice theory
are instructive here.
Toward a framework of comfort practices
Citing Schatzki (2001), Yolanda Strengers (2012, p. 226) suggests that social
practice theory aims to offer a distinct ontological account of the social, one that
focuses not merely on norms and meanings or institutions and instead foregrounds
relations between practices and material arrangements. In seeking to overcome the
dualisms of production and consumption, and overly simplistic ideas of behavior
and consumer choice, it is an approach that not only reads the material and social
as interwoven and inherently entangled but sees that nexus as the starting point
of investigation. As Schatzki points out, “practices are the source and carrier of
meaning, language, and normativity”, whereby everyday life is held together
by and through particular material configurations (cited in Strengers 2012, p.
228). Clearly, here we see the intellectual traces of actor network theory and the
emphasis it gives to human, non-human relations. The key realization here then
is that—and as Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012, p, 10) put it—we need not
only to have a “suitably materialized, theory of practice” but also understand
that materiality as bundles or configurations of multiple elements. The authors
give the examples of cooking, sports, and driving to argue that there is a need to
critically focus attention on the links and breakages between materials—things,
technologies, and material resources—competences, a term they use to fold in
skills, techniques, and knowledge, and the meanings and values associated with
particular practices. Accordingly, in proposing that “practices emerge, persist,
shift and disappear when connections between elements of these three types are
made” (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012, p. 14), they offer private transport as
an example to illustrate the analytical vantage point that needs to be adopted here:
If we take the practice of driving rather than the car or the driver as the central
unit of enquiry, it becomes clear that relations between the vehicle (along
with the road and other traffic), the know-how required to keep it in motion
and the meaning and significance of driving and passengering are intimately
related, so much so that they constitute what Reckwitz refers to as a “block”
of interconnected elements. Accordingly, novelty can come from any quarter
and at any time
(Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012, p. 31)The key implication here is that we shift the point of focus away from air
conditioning as technology or as an architectural design feature to the practices
of comfort. Strengers has helpfully elaborated on this point in relation to thermal
comfort in the home, arguing that