Asking about the future: Insights from Energy Biographies

Fiona ShiraniKaren Henwood, Catherine Butler, Karen Parkhill, Chris Groves and Nick Pidgeon.

Presentation at SLLS conference 9-11 October 2014

Time and the future in QLL• QLL concerned with temporality

• Division of time into past/present/future has significance for understanding personal biographies

• How people imagine the future can have an impact on present experiences and circumstances

• QLL has a unique position to see how perceptions of the future change over time

Energy Biographies• QLL project exploring how people use energy as part of their

everyday lives

• How do people’s biographical experiences and aspirations impact on energy use?

• How can visual methods be used to explore views and experiences of energy use?

• 4 case site areas across the UK – 74 participants/68 initial interviews, 36 took part in the QLL interviews and activities

Why not just ask?• Structured questionnaire and survey questions (e.g. Anderson et

al., 2005)• Timelines/writing tasks (Henwood and Shirani, 2012; Hanna and

Lau-Clayton, 2012)• Asking a direct question (Phoenix et al., 2007)• Challenges with these approaches

“Yeah isn’t this hard? Do you know it’s really hard, that’s a really hard question!”

“At the moment this will sound like a really badly thought out plan but I tend not to think that far ahead because the future

does actually scare me.”

“Oh God, I literally, you just don't know what's around the corner”

Text-prompted photos• 10 text messages over a 3 month period ‘take a picture of

what you are doing’• Point of comparison across the dataset• Not necessarily related to energy use• Aspects of daily life that may not otherwise be discussed

• Timeline could be used as a prompt for past/future lifestyle

“I’m very keen to get an electric car and maybe in five years’ time that might already be a possibility but I would sort of say maybe in 10 to 15 years’ time that it’s a lot more a possibility than now. Maybe my needs would have changed a little bit by then, my son would probably be driving so maybe we only need it as a family maybe only have you know a petrol car and maybe then a little electric car for me and my wife to sort of go around for local trips or something like that. So yeah I think there may be some changes as the kind of household grows into different needs … Maybe by then the kind of car hire you can sort of do by you know Sit Car or Street Car or something where you hire them by the hour if and when you need them so you have Car Club membership maybe that is more widespread in 10/15 years’ time so there may be some changes the way we sort of think. So I’m hoping to have our house the energy consumption of the house reduced by a lot.” (Dennis)

How will the society be like? [Laughs] That’s a broad question. It’s really difficult to answer that.

Videos• During interview 3 participants were shown clips from 1950s

and 2010s videos of what the home of the future might be like• What did/didn’t you like?• Was anything surprising?• How would you expect/like things to be different?

I thought I’d go for that big time, I think it’s a brilliant idea you know this challenge of having to feed 9 billion people, the more food production you could get into city flats the better. Yeah I thought that was wonderful … if you take that, go down that route nature then becomes a spiritual and a leisure resource because food growing, food production is decoupled from wild nature so wilderness becomes preserved and maintained for its own intrinsic value not for its economic, well it could have an economic value because people would pay to visit it but it wouldn’t be utilitarian in the sense the farmland is. So I say bring that on! It’s bloody brilliant and you know you could upscale it and feed whole tower blocks, not with everything but with a good proportion of their need for green stuff (Jonathan)

But there’s a price to pay for it and it’s not just the money, you know you walk around the city and it looks pretty dire sometimes and everyone is in their little houses and you know in lots of futuristic films you see cities of the future and they look, they’re wrecked, everything looks dreadful, there’s advertising hoardings everywhere and you know people are flying around on hover boards and stuff but the actual cities are dirty and it’s kind of realising that as people create their environments in their minds and in their interiors they’re less bothered about what’s going on out there. (Jack)

Things to consider• Resources for wider social futures may be scarce

• Multimodal activities are time-consuming

• Within or outside the interview encounter?

• Ethical issues in discussing the future

• Technical challenges

Summary - Multimodality in QLL

• Activities can help to sustain engagement and aid sample maintenance

• More time – greater opportunity to include a range of techniques

• Contribute to temporal understanding in QLL

• Can capture the ways views about the future change over time