Category: Blog posts

Living the tension

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Don’t worry, this isn’t about watching England play at the World Cup. It’s about feeling the tension between different ways of working and noticing those issues can also translate into how people make decisions in day to day life. What has been emerging is that my own process is showing me that change and creativity don’t always emerge from maximum efficiency.

As someone who is self-funding their PhD beyond having a scholarship to pay their tuition fees, I’m definitely motivated to try and get my PhD completed more quickly. But I’m not ‘just’ here to get a PhD – I want to produce work that is useful and will make a difference.

In some respects then, that context creates the conditions to try and move more quickly and to let go of aspects that feel less clearly defined or on the critical path to delivery. Going for efficiency in the tasks and trying to find ways to do them as effectively as possible.

Yet I’ve had an ongoing tension between the sense that my ambitions and interests are broader than the subject of the PhD, while also needing to develop a PhD project that is discretely bounded enough that it can be completed. I didn’t realise I was doing this but I’ve been reaching towards a broader articulation of the subject and what it is I’m really trying to explore. That has led to a constant baseline level of questioning when doing things about that disconnect as it manifests in a particular area.

The background hum was getting louder and impacting on my ability to be more efficient and effective. The irony of observing myself feeling like I’ve made a decision about the next task I’m going to work on or how I’ll approach something and then feeling like it isn’t quite made as I have that discussion in my head. Eventually it brought me back to some activities that had been postponed week after week, despite having felt them to be useful, where I intentionally give myself a chunk of time to just think, explore and generally thought-shower and play without having to have an end goal in mind. It’s something I’m constantly wanting to do and so creating some time where I’ve got an outlet for that seemed like it was a good idea, felt great when I was doing it and yet got moved into the next week time after time because it didn’t feel like quite the right thing to do.

In giving myself the space to just play, listen to that background hum and try to make sense of it I think I now have a clearer sense of the different layers and linkages between those things. Seeing my PhD as a way to explore ideas through a particular case study that can inform the wider work and underlying questions I’m interested in. Peeling the onion and seeing that I’m still absolutely fascinated by my PhD but also being able to place it in the context of questions that are about what it is that enables some people to make a change and yet others don’t. Exploring and trying to make sense of what kinds of factors help indicate whether something is going to catalyse action or whether it is a good idea that won’t translate.

What felt like a luxury I could live without, even as I could see the value of it, became something that has helped speed things up and brought more clarity to the things I am doing. With that clearer articulation of the different layers and what I’m really trying to explore, I was able to revisit some things like the survey I had drafted and update the questions before they went out into the world. They are still aligned to answering the PhD but also link better to the overarching questions I’m interested in.

Given a lot of what I’m exploring through the PhD is around decision making, that sense of a tension between feeling like the need for speed was helping me make a decision, and realising it was hindering me has been interesting. There can be an underlying sense of a need for speed in decisions people are trying to get agreed that relate to environmental or climate issues – whether it’s an organisational or individual level. That might relate to the urgency of addressing issues that the science and natural systems drives, or it can be artificially generated urgency relating to funding or financing offers that are time limited. John Vaillant in ‘Fire and Flood’ is good at drawing out the different timescales that people can operate at and how time can be experienced differently – what feels fast in terms of the science can feel slow in terms of how humans experience it.

For myself, it’s been a good reminder from that some ways of working which are useful need to be protected in my days and weeks from a practical perspective. Doing a PhD gives me the space to make that happen and become embedded that will hopefully make it easier to protect that whatever comes next. It’s also been a useful reflection to take with me when looking at the circumstances that are being created for people we are trying to get decisions from.

Same but different?

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As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.

This is bad weather

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There are different aspects to vulnerability and adaptation – some relate to physical aspects and some to capability – and the current heatwave in parts of the UK are showing both elements of that, but I’m particularly interested in the social elements of it. The social and cultural elements of adaptation, as with mitigation, are challenging but unlocking those aspects could then help provide the resources needed to deal with the physical aspects.

I’m, very slowly and a bit brain foggily, writing this piece as where I live in the UK experiences a heatwave and it doesn’t currently feel like actively enjoyable weather. I haven’t sleep well last night as it was too stifling, with no breeze. The room felt suffocating, I eventually got up and went outside where it was a bit cooler. Today I’m really not feeling very awake or engaged and I’m lucky enough to be able to arrange my work activities to do things that don’t require so much brain power. I was out in the hot, hot heat as I had an event to go to but it really didn’t feel like a good idea.

Yet I’ve heard and read lots of people describing it as nice or good weather – even as they might otherwise be talking about how uncomfortable the heat is. This does not seem like good weather to me, and nor does it seem like they actually think it is when they talk about different elements of their experience.

Perhaps the reason adaptation struggles to get much traction is that in the UK people associate ‘bad weather’ with rain, wind and cold weather. By contrast, hot weather can often be considered to be good weather – in part because of the conception that it’s really rainy and you can never trust it to be sunny in the summer. Hence the cultural idea of having a rainy Bank Holiday BBQ or rain-lashed picnic in the car. The idea that sunny weather could be ‘bad’ doesn’t fit with that view and so then the default for many is to describe it as good, even as they might talk about the impacts negatively.

While some impacts of hot weather can be obvious – such as wildfires, train cancellations or sunburn – it can be less so than floods or heavy snowfall where the impact is more visually obvious. If there are fatalities as a result of flooding or snowfall it tends to be more immediate and clearer to see the connection, whereas with heatwaves it can be harder to tell. Often people die as a result of an underlying condition which is exacerbated by the hot weather. These deaths show up as ‘excess deaths’ which is not a mechanism that is as easily communicated or has the same clarity of cause and effect.

However, a consistent message in the literature is that people underestimate the impacts and are reluctant to take action, even where it will affect them. In relation to flooding which has historically been more common than heatwaves, people can underestimate the likelihood of being affected, as the title of Burningham et al’s 2008 piece ‘‘It’ll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk’ suggests. Research on attitudes to and behaviours undertaken in heatwaves from by Erens et al (2021) found that people who were the most vulnerable or potentially vulnerable to heatwaves didn’t realise they could be affected and only a quarter of potentially vulnerable people changed their behaviour. Research by the British Red Cross found relatively high levels of understanding of actions that could be taken, yet there was a significant drop-off in the number of people who actually took action.

Helping to shift that narrative and getting people to engage with the fact this isn’t good weather for many feels like a pre-condition to then take steps to adapt to it. In the absence of that understanding, it is unsurprising people wouldn’t take action. It’s something that happens to other people rather than to them, until it isn’t of course.

London School of Economics research suggests there is a low expectation among people that government is taking sufficient steps to respond. This could partly be projection by them but also seems to be outsourcing responsibility to a government that is unlikely to be getting lobbied on this by people who don’t think it’s an issue for them. All in all it’s currently quite a hot mess and likely to keep getting hotter unless we can find a way to recognise how things really are and go from there.

Dis-aggregating the home

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It sounds obvious but it can be helpful to think about the home in terms of the different parts and how they have changed, recognising elements don’t all change at the same time or in similar ways. This moves it away from thinking of it as one monolithic entity which changes in a monolithic way and it strikes me this feels like a shift from some ways in which people can talk about the home. And it made me wonder if perhaps part of why it can feel difficult to improve homes is that often the homes get conceived of as monoliths, which can feel quite daunting.

From a historical perspective, there’s been lots of investigations of how the home and parts of it have changed over time. Judith Flanders brilliant ‘The making of home’ takes the long view, while ‘The great indoors’ by Ben Highmore is looking at how homes have changed over the last 100 years or so in particular. There is also plenty of work looking at different aspects of the home, from Barbara Penners ‘Bathroom’ to chapters in Irene Cieraad’s ‘At home: an anthology of domestic space’ that variously cover how entrance halls have changed, Dutch windows or the move to open plan living.

Perhaps the focus on a ‘whole-house’ approach might be part of what drives that sense of the house as a monolithic space for many in the environmental sector. That the need is there to try and improve all of the building fabric, think holistically about the ventilation strategy and consider factors that will affect the movement and management of moisture in and around the building to avoid damaging the building or creating issues with mould and damp.

In part that view of the home as a monolithic entity also seems to stem from the understandable intention to try and avoid the performance gap. Treating the home as a whole system and trying to understand what’s particular about it – from a technical perspective but also in terms of what people value about the place. Albeit in practice that isn’t what happens enough of the time – either in terms of the design or the installation of measures.

It’s obviously possible to do a whole-house retrofit that takes place over time – so even if that’s the end goal it can then be more light in terms of the interventions. For a long time I had a great love for building renovation passports as a way to help people work out how to integrate retrofit measures into their wider home improvements. There’s lots of work happening in the social housing sector that takes a more piecemeal approach to improving homes over time. Some of that is driven by applying for sources of funding as and when they come up, and some of it reflects that over time a home will move through different teams who are responsible for works to homes – from voids to repairs and maintenance or special projects for instance.

Whereas if the discussion was dis-aggregated and focused around specific aspects, might it feel slightly less daunting? Dialling down the stress of it all, reducing the temperature a bit. It might feel easier to imagine looking to engage people with the need to change out a heating system rather than trying to get people on board with thinking about the whole house in one go. For most people, that’s how they think about their homes more generally – the bathroom needs doing, something needs to be done about the cupboard under the stairs etc – so it brings it in line with other elements too. In and of itself that makes it more manageable for people when thinking about their own homes.

This shift also allows for an approach which accepts that it isn’t just going to change incrementally in terms of aspects of the building but also over time too. So that then it isn’t about trying to claim that this is the ultimate perfection that can be offered but recognising that a particular technology might be the best for now, but that is likely to change in time too.

That change of mindset can then help people think more tactically too. My PhD is all about linking in environmental improvements to wider home improvements – instead of thinking about the whole house it’s then trying to find a way in and working from there. Going with the grain of works that either need to be done because something has broken, or works that people are exploring or choosing to get done.

There are lots of practical implications which arise from making that shift, and I hope to explore those further as my PhD progresses. But the act of thinking differently about our homes, and therefore parts of our homes, feels like it could be a helpful mindset shift that makes it much easier to talk to people about changes. Taking the idea apart to help put the actual space back together a bit differently.

These are the good times

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It feels important to try and acknowledge in the moment when something is good. Too often we can get caught up in the business of finding reasons not to be cheerful, as though in grumbling about minor issues we can ward off the really bad ones. I’m in another transition phase at the moment and in that shift it’s given me opportunity to pause and feel greatful.

It’s partly a transition time because I’ve been spending lots of time on a couple of non-PhD projects I’ve been working on, and I’m back to just focusing on my PhD. They have been related to my PhD so it’s not a total shift but still, they weren’t entirely filed under PhD work. I put in a big old shift over the weekend on one of them so it felt like I was coming back to work this week for a bit of a rest.

Even if I hadn’t been working on some other projects it would be a transitional phase at the moment in any case because ethics approval has been granted. My project is officially ethical!

Given how much I have enjoyed the ethics framing I’m not surprised to find myself feeling quite touched by that approval.

More tangibly, it means that I can now start to officially talk to people and do the more direct data collection activities. I’d already made a start on some aspects of the research alongside my literature review, collecting together and starting to review cultural materials and existing government and industry reports. I’ve also done some study dates, such as the ones to Sambourne House and Tate Britain and a couple of archive visits. So it’s not like that part of it hasn’t been happening at all, again not a total transition.

It feels very different getting to speak to people or send out surveys directly, rather than relying upon existing materials though. A classic part of the research and PhD process. It feels like it has been a long time coming but then this is a marathon not a sprint so perhaps that’s not so surprising after all.

And it’s exciting to imagine what I might find. Fun to not be able to entirely predict how something is going to unfold and where it might lead. Privileged to be able to do it at all, I mean really, what an absolute privilege to have made this space for myself, to be able to back myself to explore and try something different.

It’s good sometimes to be able to sit with that and cherish it. Not just to rush through the moments. To try and notice as it something shifts, or when something is good and feels full of possibility or even when the possibility is getting translated into something more tangible. Allowing those moments to get consciously stashed away. Not to artificially extend it but to pay some attention, give a sense of gratitude and acknowledgement and then go back to the thing itself. Which seems a fitting note to end on, as I then turn to putting together my survey to pilot…

The power of one

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For all of the talk of relational approaches to increasing the take-up of energy or environmental measures, I was struck when hearing a friend’s recent account of home renovations about the limits to that approach.

Talking about my PhD can often lead to reflections from people about their own homes and experiences. One friend talked about how their plumber had done some research and come to the conclusion that heat pumps didn’t work unless the home is really well insulated. On that basis my friends ended up going ahead and getting their ailing boiler replaced with a new one, with lots of attendant disruption to have a more efficient system put in. They also had a builder who didn’t understand building physics and hadn’t raised any concerns when my friends wanted some air bricks covered up as part of works to replaster and repaint walls.

Had my friends got a plumber who had investigated and come to a different view, which is quite possible given the increasing number of use cases that are coming online of heat pumps performing well in inefficient buildings, they might have been persuaded to have a heat pump. Similarly, had they got a builder who had a better understanding of building physics, when there was a discussion about covering over air vents the builder should have raised the ventilation point. The builder might have explained the premise of the ventilation strategy the home was built with and suggested some alternative options if they did still decide to cover them over. They could also have suggested mitigations in rooms where previous owners had already covered over or removed air vents. Instead my friends randomly found out about the ventilation approach because the algorithm served up some information.

That reliance on others who are seeming experts and placing trust in their views is very in keeping with a relational approach. This holds that we make decisions on the basis of how the home will be for those we care about but also that trades-people can have a big impact on the choices people make. However these examples from my friends also seems to suggest it really depends who you get and there’s an element of luck in that currently. In the absence of requirements or an environment where information about how homes work is a foundational part of being a trades-person, for a relational approach to energy to work for good performance outcomes a higher basic level of knowledge is needed.

It was another reminder of how far away we are from that baseline situation now and how normal it is that builders don’t consistently have, or need to have, a holistic level of knowledge. There were lots of ways in which the builder seemed to have done a good job but those were in aspects that were more visible to my friends than the potential impact of closing up the ventilation would be, at least in the short term. If it is incumbent upon non-experts to be in a position to challenge experts that seems to be a situation which is unlikely to drive good behaviours, isn’t realistic or fair on those who are getting the work done and leads to a situation that looks much like the one we have now.

This suggests the relational approach can be important in helping people make decisions and there’s something valuable in focusing on that as a route to reach people. However, without improving the underpinning levels of knowledge it feels like there’s a real risk that approach will end up perpetuating the idea the building trade can’t be trusted and does poor work – this time more explicitly in relation to energy or environmental measures. In a sector which has issues around the quality of work done through government and energy obligation funded schemes, widening the range of tenures mistakes get made in doesn’t feel ideal. Finding a way to have improvements in generating demand – for instance through the relational approach – going hand in hand with work to improve the quality of the supply chain feels like a way to try and sustainably address issues in the round.

The Anna Karenina principle?

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I was reminded of the Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina that ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ when thinking about the surprising absence so far in the novels I’m reading for my PhD. One of the strands of my research is looking at existing materials to try and get a perspective on homes and how they’ve been represented, what the view is on how to improve them or just what ‘good’ looks like. As part of this I’ve read a few novels, and have still lots more to read but I’ve been surprised not to have found many examples of ‘the ideal home’, or even ones which are very happy yet. In remembering the Tolstoy quote it made me wonder if there’s something inherent in novels that explains this lack, or whether it’s more a reflection of my limited reading so far.

The Anna Karenina principle takes the idea from Tolstoy and applies it more broadly, holding that there is only one way to achieve success in that the key factors need to be in place, but there are countless ways to fail. This principle has been applied in contexts as diverse as ecology, banking and the domestication of animals.

Turning to the novels, there are a few slightly oblique glimpses of homes that seem to be happy. The couple who have their home and themselves attacked by Alex and his droogs in Anthony Burgess’s ‘A clockwork orange’; the family home of one of the main characters in ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – although that’s more how it is represented or seen through the eyes of a visitor than by the occupants. Maybe some traces in the Elizabeth Gaskell novel ‘Cranford’ – but even there it isn’t straightforward because of the financial concerns of many of the protagonists. Alice’s home in Sarah Moss’s ‘The Fell’ has some details in there about how she takes comfort from details around the place, yet there is also a real sense of her isolation as she is recovering from cancer alone in a time of pandemic.

Looking at the list of novels I’m still yet to explore, none of them jump out at me as being about homes that are harmonious, idyllic refuges. I might find some more representations of that in the surrounding characters but the central premise of many of the books is about the home as a site of, or representation of, things falling apart, disconnection and sadness.

Perhaps this is because fiction tends to have a narrative drive at the heart of it. A tension which needs to be resolved somehow, and so happiness can be less easy to place there because the ‘happy ever after’ is the end not the through-line. That there is something implied about unhappiness being ‘news’ or a step away from the norm of a happy home. The novel is then a way to show how the world could be, and is for many others with all of the pain and darkness that can bring. Allowing us to understand something we might not experience ourselves.

Or could it be that the home as an unhappy or unsafe place works as a plot device because it immediately enables the reader to compare the context to the idea and ideal of home. A difficult home context allows the reader to get a sense of the protagonist being in a bad place. This can make them more sympathetic to the character. It also makes it understandable the character would be seeking a way to improve their situation in a way the writer doesn’t need to explain as much as they might for some other choices or needs.

Of course it could also be because writers don’t see enough happy homes around the place to make them feel believable or true. Writing novels can be a way to draw attention to things that aren’t right. To reflect back things society needs to or isn’t engaging with. From Dickens and Hardy in Victorian times to the novels of the 2020’s, art and culture can offer insights to lives that are beyond our own, and empathy for them which makes taking action necessary. For the novels of the 2020’s on my reading list, without even having read most of them there’s a clear theme emerging around how precarious housing can be. From Ella Frears’ ‘Goodlord’ which takes the form of an extended email to an unscrupulous estate agent to Megan Nolan’s ‘Ordinary human failings’ about families in temporary accommodation, to the 2024 novels ‘I see buildings fall like lightning’ by Keiran Goddard and ‘The lodgers’ by Holly Pester, about a housing estate and the UK housing crisis respectively.

That leaves me wondering if it’s less of a surprise I’m not finding more happy homes in the novels. While the quote from Tolstoy helped shape that sense of surprise, the principle doesn’t feel quite right in terms of the view of home. It’s true that even in the 14 novels I’ve read so far I’ve loved the diversity of style, tone and characters – a huge range even as the subject itself remains fixed and the homes are largely unhappy. Yet while there are lots of commonalities in the factors constituting a happy home, the plurality of ways a good home can be made seems to undermine the principle from that direction.

Futures building

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For whatever reason, when I went to Futurebuild last week I found myself reflecting on the differences between this visit and my first one in 2007 – to EcoBuild as it was then known. Of course memory is notoriously fallible, so my sense of what was different and what felt the same is perhaps also a reflection of my current perceptions projecting onto the past. I was only there for one day, I had a mix of wandering around, going to talks, and talking to a few people so what follows is therefore a very unscientific impression of the things I saw and heard, an attempt to think about what’s changed and what remains the same.

Thinking about the differences between me then and now, I remembered how, the first time I went, I was there for all 3 days – running around like a child in a candy store, if by candy we mean heat interface units and insulation materials. The event was something I had been looking forward to for weeks, checking and re-checking the event listings to luxuriate in the anticipation. By early on the second day I had a good sense of where the freebies were and I would strategically do a walk-by here to get a snack, there to pick up a canvas bag and I half-remember getting a good stash of bottles of maple syrup.

I didn’t have a very clear agenda or priorities, I was just really interested in learning and open to finding out more about everything. Part of that was where I was in my role and career, trying to develop the sustainability agenda at the organisation I was working in – I had identified the gap and been given a little bit of space to develop proposals but without any kind of direction. I love that type opportunity but it felt like I wasn’t sure what it would look like or how I’d be able to contribute. It all felt quite new, hard to place much of the information in the broader context given I was learning as I went. I do remember that feeling of being very relieved to be away from the office and have some autonomy in my days though, and a sense of sadness as I wandered around as the exhibition closed down around me.

By contrast, last week I was able to make space to go for most but not all of one day. I had a brief look at what was on across the days and didn’t feel like any of the sessions were obviously super linked to my PhD – which made me a bit sad but also served as a reminder that hopefully my research will be useful for people. I ended up going on the day I did because it fitted in with other things that were going on work-wise and because an out of town friend of mine was due to be on a panel that day so I would be able to catch up with him. I still felt open to the variety of the event, much like the me who first went, but probably not like all the previous versions of me that had been, or hadn’t even been able to make time to go – which made me feel very happy and fortunate to be in the position I’m in now.

I caught up with someone I know well and we managed to find our way together into a proper, messy and beautiful conversation, which felt even more rare and magical given the contrast with the shiny sales stands surrounding us. I had some conversations with others I know, some people I met at the event and some quick waves to others I didn’t get a chance to say hi to properly. I wasn’t exactly sad to be away from my (home) office but I didn’t feel relieved either. With lots of interesting things that I’m working on, it felt good to enjoy the event within the wider context I’m working in.

It also felt different in that this time I saw mention of places and projects I’ve been involved with in different ways over time, which made it feel like more of a space that I’m part of than I felt the first time around. I really enjoyed attending a workshop where one of my brilliant PhD supervisors gave another engaging and inspiring talk about the lessons we can and should learn from the move from town gas to natural gas. I didn’t feel like a total outsider this time around, I could see things I had helped design and shape, and I have more ideas about ways in which I can be helpful.

What felt different this time was that it felt like there was more of a human angle to the sessions. Less technology-centric with more of a recognition of the need for individuals working in this area and the people in buildings that are on the receiving end of retrofits to be considered and consulted. Relatedly, there were also more discussion about the impacts when those things aren’t happening, particularly in terms of residents, and how that affects delivery. There was more non-technical content than I remember from the first time around – both in terms of the subject matter of the talks and also in some of the different organisations that had stands. Of course that could be a case of confirmation bias, given the focus of my PhD but I didn’t feel like I was surrounded by technology stands this time.

There were still plenty of grumbles about government and what they can or should be doing differently or better, but there was also a sense from some that there is a lot happening. That government has provided (some?) people and organisations with a great opportunity through the range of activities they have set in motion and it’s now incumbent upon people to try and make it work. That sense of positivity and trying to make the most of the current context felt refreshing – in any context it can be hard for people to recognise the good times as it is happening. For a sector that can still seem scarred by the Green Deal which ended in 2015, that ability to focus on the here and now felt really wonderful.

One of the biggest shifts I noticed was around a focus on monitoring performance, with lots of services available. Giving people more access to data about actual performance to enable people to have more visibility of what’s actually happening in practice. This offers more scope to try and drive better quality installations and address the performance gap.

Turning then to what felt the same, for all of the differences in myself and the sector, there was much which felt worryingly the same. The big ticket thing for me was people talking about wanting to get to scale. That underlying drumbeat of desire which is beautiful, necessary and also reflective of how far away it still is. Talking about delivery of ‘large-scale schemes’ that in practice are small-scale, given how far away they are from the scale that’s actually needed. Of promising pilots which really could be the next big thing, that unlock the change that’s needed but right now no-one knows and so it’s a case of trying and seeing.

It did still seem like there is a focus on government to provide the funding and framework in which activity can happen at scale. It still feels like there’s an underlying assumption that this is a necessary precondition. While there is a recognition of the need to explore different funding models, and move away from the subsidy junkie approach, walking around I saw a lot of companies that didn’t have very clearly defined propositions, or ones that were clearly additive rather than extractive. The propositions had broadened and changed beyond technologies or installers but still, I left with an impression that some of the companies plying their trade there weren’t necessarily designed for or enabling a more transformative approach.

Despite the conversations about scale and funding, it still seemed like much of the focus was on the social housing sector. Given the relative sizes of the other sectors, with social housing the smallest , the fact I couldn’t find any sessions the day I went which were focused on other tenures, and only a couple on other days didn’t feel very reassuring. There was lots of talk about the cost and how expensive it is and how there’s a need to draw in funding from a variety of different sources, yet there weren’t many sessions which engaged with this. It also meant that discussions around how people think about their homes and what they want from them didn’t feel very centred in many of the discussions. That fundamental driver of my PhD felt like it got a little bit of space but I definitely didn’t see sessions I could easily imagine my research fitting into this year.

What struck me the most was how limited the reckoning with the findings of the recent National Audit Office report felt. For an industry long beset by concerns about the performance gap, a report which was so stark in the findings, and which reinforced views and concerns in the sector, it was odd not have more of an explicit focus on improving quality. There was some implicit recognition of it in the increased number of organisations offering monitoring services and in some of the projects being developed. Implicitly there too in sessions encouraging a sharing of learning, and it was great to see those sessions with people from across the UK. That felt really valuable but wasn’t a space installers and manufacturers were in. That could be unfair though, a trade event might not be the place people feel comfortable having those discussions. Without that explicit focus on improving the actual quality of works at a systems level, it is hard to see how we can get anywhere near the scale we are all still trying to unlock.

That left me feeling like it is easier to feel and see the changes in me. From just starting out, trying to inch myself into an area I wanted to be working in, to feeling now like I have some perspectives that can be helpful. I can bring insights that are grounded in practical delivery and informed by my own research and learning. Feeling how different the day to day and the context is now compared to when I first went.

As someone who wants to be helpful, I’ve found it difficult writing this piece when thinking in terms of where the sector is at more generally. I’m interested in what it is I’m creating when I invent or remember that past and compare it to now. I’ve been reflecting for a while on a sentence I read by Bill McKibben – when he was asked how people can make a difference as individuals, his reply was people should ‘be less of an individual’. He was talking about how people should think about themselves in the context of systems as systems change can leverage more impact than individual actions alone.

Thinking about where to place an emphasis and in recognising my role as part of a system, and wanting to effect change, I thought about just focusing on the many good things I took away from the event. I have definitely felt happy seeing reflections from people who were there, either at the time or afterwards talking about a sense of hope. Recognising that there is a wider range of voices and perspectives. That I’m not alone, or even a totally marginal voice, in thinking about the need to engage with what people want and feel and to think more holistically about homes and improvements to them. That people are focused on what can be done and trying to work things out in a purposive way, rather than session and discussions filled with people talking about how impossible and hard it all is.

It feels too easy to criticise and point out what’s wrong rather than focusing on the positives. Recognising that it’s easy to be a critic and thinking back to this quote from Theodore Roosevelt where he said ‘the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly’. That while it’s easier to criticise others than to build things yourself, it is much more rewarding to be the one who is building things.

Yet that niggling sense of worry I have keeps coming in, that while there is a greater diversity of views there is much that feels unchanged. That part of myself which feels worried we’re still trying to build on foundations that feel unstable. Reading and hearing comments about the National Audit Office report and wider longstanding issues with performance and quality being passed off as a few bad apples or not really engaged with enough or sufficiently substantively to have confidence the many examples of good practice are becoming entrenched as industry norms. Too little engagement with what people actually think and feel about their homes and a limited focus on tenures beyond social housing – hearing more voices calling for approaches that align with what my research is exploring but still struggling to see a context in which the aims of my research are accepted and embedded.

That in a time of political instability, with both the political and physical climates deteriorating, there is still a large reliance across much of the sector on government interventions as the element that is going to unlock change and action. Yet even amidst the instability and the latest UK political psycho-drama affecting progress, Ed Miliband and DESNZ are putting in a pretty solid shift to try and address the challenges of the moment in a sustainable, transformative way. Much in the detail that could be better in what they are doing but the sense of ambition feels evident. There’s a real risk that if we don’t find a way to shore up the foundations we won’t be able to make the most of the current opportunities.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising I don’t feel I can pick a side in the positive or critical perspective on the event and where the sector is at. That uncertain, nuanced view could be a fair reflection of how things are, and what story the conference was offering. Partially and imperfectly – in the arenas and stands, in private conversations and workshop sessions – people were telling stories of patchy, slow progress. Difficult reckonings, signs of hope, tentative progress and patterns of behaviour being recognised and grappled with, alongside the same mistakes over and over and over, of things still unresolved and unexplored. I left the event feeling energised by that sense of being part of a sector still willing to dare greatly, yet uncertain if or how those unresolved tensions beneath it are really being addressed widely enough.

What if it could be fun?

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George Saunders talks a lot about how when he goes to write, he’s wondering about what will be fun in the work he’s doing and it’s such a helpful reminder that play can really unlock your thinking and help you make progress. In a context where the emphasis on productivity and efficiency can be strong – hacks and hints, tips and how to’s abound – the call to fun can feel counter-intuitive.

Thinking about, and trying to find the fun in something is in part about just allowing yourself to be open to things. There’s a sense of curiosity and wonder about which mitigates against a lot of that sense of being stuck which makes it hard to see things as they are, or to imagine how they could be otherwise. Looking for fun also suggests the need to review a situation from a variety of perspectives – if at first you don’t find the fun, keep going. That’s a brilliant suggestion more generally when working on something because considering multiple perspectives is a way to see if there are other interpretations or test approaches.

There’s also a sense of lightness about looking for the fun in something that can be really helpful. It makes it easier to hold the issues a bit more lightly – rather than clinging on to ideas, whether your own or existing ones – it can create a space to think. That isn’t to downgrade or dismiss the difficult, fun can be respectful of the circumstances while also giving a better chance of not serving to the make the issue bigger than it needs to be.

Whether it’s a knotty work problem, challenging relationship with someone or wrangling with an idea or issue, thinking about looking for the fun can help unlock things. I recently wrote something for another context and audience that was very different to other kinds of writing I’ve done before. It felt like it still had my voice but did feel much more exploratory and, yes, playful than some other pieces. I had gone to it feeling quite heavy, not sure if I could translate a general idea I had for the piece into something more specific. Reading Saunder’s encouragement to be playful totally altered my perspective and reminded me how lucky I was to have the opportunity to explore and try.

There are lots of ways to start. It could be something more organised using an approach such as Lego’s Serious Play, designed to develop imagination and problem solving. Equally it could be a quick activity or game by yourself or with others – as is often the case, the Squiggly Careers podcast has a fun and useful episode with some suggestions.

Go looking for chances to bring fun into your day, think about how you can make play more of your every day. Have fun trying to have fun…

Echoes across the pages

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Spoiler alert: this piece is about the endings of two novels ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece and ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier.

As part of my PhD I’m reading, watching, looking at and visiting cultural materials and buildings, museums and houses to get different perspectives on home. It isn’t surprising that I would start to see echoes between them but I was a bit surprised that burning down the house would be an early contender.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – about Geth and Olwen – a couple of people from North Wales who were connected as children and then reconnect as adults. The book is set in and around a house – Ty Gwydr, which for Geth isn’t a place he owns but feels like it is his, and that Olwen and her husband briefly own and creates a place for them to reunite. At the end of the novel it implies that Geth sets fire to the house but we never explicitly see this. Having recently read ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier, that links back to the end of the novel where the implication is that Manderley has been set on fire. We don’t directly see the flames but the red sky and falling ash clearly suggest that is what is happened.

In both stories the home is a place of memories but also becomes, for those who decide to burn down the house – Geth and it seems Mrs Danvers in ‘Rebecca’ – a place that reminds them of a future they can no longer have. For Geth, it seems clear that Olwen chose to stay with her husband James, rather than leave him for Geth. There’s something about not being able to be with the only person he’s ever loved in that way. For Olwen, when thinking about telling James she wants to end things, she says something about it never being about not loving him, even as she clearly has very strong feelings for Geth. So there’s a difference in terms of the space that the other has in their lives and what that relationship means for each of them in terms of the possibility of love. There is also something about what the relationship would open up or close down for each of them. For Geth, there’s a suggestion of the relationship with Olwen allowing him to live in different ways – partly that he might get to live in the house he’s come to think of as his own. But also perhaps a life that goes beyond the area he grew up in. That he knows everyone and is a kind of big fish in a small pond there, and while that’s comfortable, Olwen offers him a chance to go beyond that. For Olwen it would be more of a narrowing down – financially she would be leaving someone who is very rich for someone who definitely isn’t. But more than it’s also someone who moves through the world in a quite different way – Geth is perhaps less comfortable in some situations than James is.

The ending of the stories serves to makes the home more of a character – a place that has held and facilitated ways of being in the present, as well as a holder of memories. Something that acts upon people as well as being acted upon. In Rebecca I was surprised by how the destruction of Manderley didn’t seem to have quite freed up the de Winter’s in the way the oppressive nature of Manderley, and Mrs Danvers, had seemed to suggest it might have done. For Geth though, it’s less clear what might become of him once the house is burned down and there’s presumably an investigation. Olwen and James seem to still be together and had planned to sell the house – their second home. So while they will be somewhat affected, given their wealth and decision to leave and sell, the impact for them is likely to be much more cushioned.

For both Geth and Mrs Danvers, there’s a sense they are trying to take control of a situation that is beyond their control. That the choices they wanted have become impossible for them, in Olwen staying with James and with the death of the first Mrs de Winter. It’s hard then to imagine what they can do, how they can be, and so they kick out and bring down the house which epitomises that. It’s a narrow kind of control because it can’t get them what they want but it can at least take them further away from their lost chances and so it’s understandable that might feel like the only choice they have now.

I’ve still got lots more books to read so I’m interested as to whether there will be more stories of the house burning down to end it all. As a plot device, burning down the house has a finality to it so I can see why it would be something that authors might reach for. A way to draw a line under what has happened and show that a situation, or way of being or seeing the world is now no longer possible. It serves to heighten the emotions of those who destroyed the homes physically, while showing how others might have destroyed the meaning of the home in other ways already.