What freedom do tools of self monitoring give?

What tools of performance monitoring can RetroForm give to its users to help accelerate self build retrofits?

Individual Abstract:

With the rise of the internet has come the production and study of the ‘internet of things’ which can simply be described as the network created between devices that are able to collect data, connect to the internet and transmit the gathered information beyond the device.¹ This essay focuses on the techno-political issues that surround the introduction of performance monitoring devices within the domestic space of British homes. The ‘internet of things’ entrance into the realm of the domestic has transformed the capabilities of the home into a data-collecting space that has not previously been seen in human history and therefore demands critical analysis into the consequences it presents to the social. There is a growing concern that the home we once knew as a private space is becoming increasingly more vulnerable as smart devices become capable of acting as agents of surveillance. This not only raises alarm in relation to our privacy but it also shifts the way in which the social is constructed. A new relationship between the occupiers of space and the hidden audience takes place through the technology of the smart device and therefore creates a place in which powers of governance and consumerism can be exercised. In order to protect the freedom of the individual within the highly technical structure of the ‘internet of things’, the construct of devices such as those of performance monitoring, must be aware of the sociological consequences that may arise, so that strategies of security and privacy can be built within the programming of the device.

What form of performance monitoring does RetroFrom give to its users:

The initial levels of engagement on the RetroForm platform are designed to give tools of performance monitoring to the occupants of British homes. In level one, the user modifies a digital house to best match the condition of their existing home and results in an energy efficiency evaluation by the platform that encourages the user to advance and address ways in which their home could come closer to achieving carbon neutral. Level two breaks down the environmental constraints of a home and the user undergoes a guided process on how to measure and understand the performance of their existing building fabric to be able to make their own decisions on where self built interventions might need to happen.

Introduction:

The RetroForm platform provides a tool for self monitoring the performance of the home to enable action to be taken to improve its energy efficiency. Rather than focusing on an in depth explanation of what the tool is, this essay will instead explore how a tool of performance monitoring can be introduced into the English home and critically question what form of freedom it then gives to the occupant. To answer the ‘how’, a key case study will be referenced. To answer the ‘what’, theories on social ordering, the techno-political, the techno-social, feminism and labour process will be explored in relation to RetroForms ambition to make self build project more approachable and will reveal the key concerns that arise.

fig.01 Level 1 and Level 2 of the RetroForm Platform

Case Study: The Damp Frog

A case study of interest is The Damp Frog project that was organised in 2015 by the Bristol Approach and funded by the European Union Horizon research and innovation programme. The project set out to discover issues affecting peoples health and well being and to produce solutions to issues that local authorities has left unresolved. After network analysis through conversations in local hotspots of the everyday, such as the hair dresser and the chip shop, the team discovered that damp affected over 30% of Bristol homes and that the scale of the issue had not previously been efficiently demonstrated and therefore occupants had little evidence to enable them to challenge their negligent landlords. The solution was crafted by people involved in the subject matter and by others interested in creating change using technology. Through a series of co-design workshops a ‘damp-busting’ system was developed that enabled the collection, analysis and visualisation of data around damp homes.² RetroForm’s data collection interface within level 1 and 2 takes inspiration from the frog-cased sensor created by Bristol Approach’s project in which the strong aesthetic created an emotional engagement between the technology and the occupant and therefore enabled the project as a whole to engage with the community it set out to help. The positive impact of the Damp Frog project can be seen in the focus it gave to the people rather than the technology, whilst an environment of transparency and inclusivity was built into the organisation of the project by the technology being created out of the workshops rather than being introduced without local input at the start of the project.³ However, what remains unclear is the use of the data once the project had finished and therefore started the following investigation into what ideologies of freedom do tools of self monitoring represent.

fig.02 Techno-Engagment Between User and Platform

Patrick Joyce The Rule of Freedom

This essay explores Patrick Joyce’s theory on the “complexity of freedom’s operation”⁴ through the material form of technical domestic energy monitoring devices which can be seen as one of the many different agents of social ordering that have been knitted into the fabric of our everyday lives.⁵ The material object of a monitoring device, such as the gas meter, are highly tangible examples of a technical object holding a political guise. Since RetroForm proposes to ingrain an attitude of awareness for ones own energy consumption through a guided process of self monitoring, this essay examines how introducing this process into the everyday may in fact be adding more to the capability of the domestic to act as a site of power, rather than the platforms intention for a freedom in knowing how your home performs and what it may need to improve.

fig.03 The Performance of Urban Life

This essay draws parallels between Patrick Joyce’s form of analysis on the performance of urban life to the analysis of the performance of a carbon neutral home. This form of analysis has an awareness that many different levels of performance exist and that it is within the interaction between these levels that strategies of governmental power may be realised and in turn,⁶ the political positioning held within monitoring devices may also be recognised. Retro forms vision of an accessible retrofit home that allows for carbon neutral energy consumption is a vision for an environmentally cleaner built environment which Joyce would argue envisions a certain freedom. This freedom is realised around the home and the person; the person can freely choose what adjustments are to be made to the home and are therefore responsible and self monitoring.⁷ The infrastructure of knowledge that the platform aims to create sets up “the conditions of possibility in which freedom might be exercised”⁸. The self build retrofit attitude fostered by RetroForms infrastructure is what Joyce calls the agency of material things by referencing the work of John Law in his book Organising Modernity.

John Law: The Organising of Modernity

John Law examines how the social is also performed by material things whilst simultaneously acknowledging the participation of each individual by considering us all social philosophers and thus a theory on the technosocial emerges. Law’s concept of actor-network analysis lays out a belief that it is the combination of human and non-human materials that social ordering takes place, explaining that without materials such as text and technology, human action could not spread very far. According to Law, the many different non-human materials, of which data is one, are modes of communication that should be treated as products and effects in sociological analysis. In doing so, the practice of actor-network analysis creates an awareness of the agency and subsequent concerns that could arise out of the processes of ordering that create effects such as processes of technology.⁹

Clendinning: Demons of Domesticity

The first concern of which RetroForm should take into account are those of labour-process theory and feminism, in which a focus is given to the relationship between technologies and social relations. In her book Demons of Domesticity, Anne Clendinning takes an analytic look into the introduction of women into the gas industry to examine the gendered dimensions of the corporate world. The research gives evidence to the overall social effect the development of gas technology had on the English home, concluding that consumption is both an economic and social phenomenon. By introducing female sales representatives in the 1880’s, the gas industry feminised the market for domestic technology and began a problematic relationship between women and the world of goods. Although historians have observed that woman have been more vulnerable to exploitative processes of commercial culture due to their subordinate social and economic position, consumption simultaneously allowed the growth of women’s economic influence. Their power as consumer constructed a discourse through which disciplinary power could be contested. Clendinning’s recollection of the female demonstrators of the gas industry presents a unique example of women playing a dual role as social worker and sales women, through their new position within the corporate world, women had a voice to place importance on their industry’s potential to raise overall standards of living.¹⁰

Justin McGuirk: Privacy and Performance at Home

The history also revealed how the work of consuming required a level of decision making skills, with domestic education for girls placing great emphasis on skilful shopping and money management. Shopping therefore became an essential aspect of home making and it was within this realm that the drive for energy efficiency within the home manifest itself through promoting an image of domestic perfection.¹¹ Accompanying the drive for energy efficiency came the production of smart devices that collect the homes data which Justin McGuirk argues marked the moment in which we started to move away from the idea of the home as a private realm. The introduction of these devices enable the two-way transfer of information and therefore our lifestyles became a performance and the home became the stage.¹² The smart device is in-fact a trade off of our domestic data for energy efficiency, the real impact of which is “the erosion of our own agency”¹³ by diminishing our freedom to construct our own idea of what we desire and the freedom to participate in an uninfluenced decision making process.

fig.04 The Two-Way Transfer of Information

Sherry Turckle: Gameplay and John Law Cleaving to an Order

The second concern is around RetroForm’s use of virtual gameplay as an interface through which one learns how to monitor their physical home environment. From watching people play video games, Sherry Turckle witnessed that “for many people, what is being pursued in the video game is not just a score but an altered state”¹⁴. In the case of David, a lawyer in his mid thirties, the lack of external confusion, conflicting goals and complexities of the real world allowed him to learn how to act within the game, feel like he was in a relationship with the game and through that process recenter himself. After which he gained the ability to go and start something new, in his case, to go home and fulfil his duties as a husband.¹⁵ For Law, Turckle’s case study is an example of how “many of us have learned to want to cleave to an order”¹⁶ since order gives us ease whilst complexity serves as a distraction. One enjoys the video game because the player is able to cleave to a single order since the infrastructure of the artificial world has the effect of concealing complexity.¹⁷ This is of concern to RetroForm since raises the question: does the gameplay interface encourage self build by creating tools that are free from the distraction of complexity or does that freedom instead render the user incapable of taking action once they return to the ‘mess’ of the physical world?

Adam Greenfield: Labour Saving Technology and the Ideology of Ease

Adam Greenfield interrogates consequences of the ‘smart’ and the ‘home’ within the drive for energy efficiency by drawing a parallel between the historical Mechanical Turk and the concealed human workforce that lies behind the new app economy that facilitates a smart home. Greenfield highlights that the streamlined user interface of smart technology within the home enables the allocation of power to be hidden beneath the surface by removing the ability for the user to consciously inspect the product’s values because of its automated appearance.¹⁸ Like previously argued by Joyce, the technology holds a political guise since the human beings that facilitate each smart device are represented as merely technology leading Greenfield to question: “whose time and energy are valued, and whose are sacrificed on the altar of another’s freedom to move and to act”¹⁹. Greenfield’s concluding concern comments on how the drive for an efficient home may in fact end up with a space that may no longer represent our understanding of the home as refuge since it may no longer provide a place to recover from the pressures of the world and the pressures of efficiency itself.²⁰

Conclusion

Therefore this essay concludes that prior to the introduction of the RetroForm platform there must first be an acknowledgement of its function as a non-human material in the performance of the social and therefore with that comes the responsibility of the effect its technology may have within the social relations of the domestic space. Like the introduction of women into the gas industry, the introduction of RetroForm’s tool for performance monitoring creates an interface through which consumerist decisions are to be made. Retroform would argue this is a positive form of freedom in allowing the individual to make informed choices on what is best for their home whilst simultaneously giving them a position within construction discourse. However, the histories presented in this essay argue that the infrastructure used to create this freedom also create the possibility for the invasion of privacy, potential for targeted advertisement and the weakening of individual agency. The illuminated concerns around the techno-social stress the need for the RetroForm platform to have a clear strategy in place for the use and protection of user data within its feedback loop structure.

fig.05 The Political Guise of Technology²¹

1. Jacob Morgan, ‘A Simple Explanation Of “The Internet Of Things”’, Forbes <https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/05/13/simple-explanation-internet-things-that-anyone-can-understand/> [accessed 6 January 2021].
2. ‘Portrait-Resource-DAMP-HOMES.Pdf’ <https://www.bristolapproach.org/wp-content/up loads/2018/05/Portrait-Resource-DAMP-HOMES.pdf> [accessed 22 December 2020].
3. Ibid., p. 1–3
4. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), p. 8.
5. Ibid., p. 8.
6. Ibid., p.10–11.
7. Ibid., p. 11.
8. Ibid., p. 11.
9. John Law, Organising Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory, 1st edition (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: John Wiley & Sons, 1993), p. 1–24.
10. Anne Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889–1939, 1st edition (Routledge, 2017).
11. Ibid.
12. Eszter Steierhoffer, Justin McGuirk, and Deyan Sudjic, Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Illustrated edition (Design Museum Publishing, 2019), p.257–263
13. Ibid., p. 263.
14. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Computers and the Human Spirit (The MIT Press, 2005), p. 82.
15. 14 Ibid., p. 82–85.
16. 15 Law, Organising Modernity, p. 4.
17. 16 Ibid., p. 4–7.
18. Eszter Steierhoffer, Justin McGuirk, and Deyan Sudjic, Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Illustrated edition (Design Museum Publishing, 2019), p. 265–273.
19. 18 Ibid., p. 273.
20. 19 Ibid., p. 270–273.
21. The Turk (2002) Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_Turk (Accessed: 28 December 2020).