Buildings & Cities (Jul 2022)
The gender of smart charging
Abstract
With the growing focus on the home as a site for life, work, and energy generation and demand, home batteries of many kinds are increasingly ubiquitous. Batteries play a dual role of everyday emerging technologies (which can be used for something) and infrastructure (which enables other things). This article considers how batteries become technologies and infrastructures both for the accomplishment of practical everyday life activities and routines in the present, and imagining future everyday life. A design anthropological and ethnographic analysis of 72 Australian households with a focus on four demographically diverse women is used to investigate the gendered discourses concerning the future of battery charging; new and emerging everyday gendered techniques and routines of battery charging and their entanglements with women’s priorities for socialities of care and wellbeing. The implications of these findings are considered through the lens of recent feminist approaches to technology and technology design, together with future charging scenarios. 'Policy relevance' Dominant narratives in the technology and energy industries simplify the future of battery charging in two key ways. First, they assume that automated technological solutions will be able to organise battery use and charging in ways that will flatten energy supply and demand across households and other charging sites. Second, they tend to see energy consumers as typically able to perform everyday life tasks in such ways that are typically masculine. Ethnographic research suggests that both of these assumptions are misguided because they are misaligned with everyday life and gender. The implications for policy are that one needs to attend to diverse gendered experiences and uses of batteries and charging to understand how these are embedded in everyday life, and to develop plausible ways of designing inclusive future battery charging systems and technologies, with diverse gendered people in real everyday day life circumstances and for realistic, ethical futures.
Keywords
