Materiality and automation of household practices: Experiences from a Danish time shifting trial

There is widespread agreement that households’ electricity consumption should be flexible in order to balance demand and supply in the future smart grid. One approach to demand-side management is to time shift households’ consumption through economic incentives. This paper explores the experiences from a Danish household trial that combined static time-of-use pricing with electric vehicles.

On the basis of the empirical findings from qualitative interviews, the paper discusses what role materiality plays in the interviewed households’ experiences with time shifting their electricity-consuming practices. The interviews indicate that in particular practices where some of the activities are delegated to technologies (automatized) are most likely to be time shifted. Examples of these practices are dishwashing (with delegation of activities to dishwashers), laundering (the washing machine and tumble dryer) and EV-charging (use of timers). The empirical observations point to an interesting interplay between the practitioners’ bodily involvement in practices and the delegation of specific activities (tasks) to machines, which also relates to a more general discussion of (semi-)automatization.

In addition, the empirical findings indicate that not only the specific design of technologies but also the general materiality and physical layout of the home influence to what extent the households did time shift their practices. This also points to the importance of recognising how everyday practices of households are spatially embedded and how the time shifting of some practices might interfere negatively with other practices.

The empirical findings open up for theoretical reflections about the relationship between human and non-human actants and how this influences possible strategies for time shifting the electricity demand. As part of this, the concept of distributed agency within assemblages of practice could prove a useful concept in understanding and analysing time shifting of households’ electricity consumption.