Scripted central heating installations
and why they matter
Faye Wade
UCL Energy Institute
Supervisors: Michelle Shipworth, Dr Russell Hitchings, Dr David Shipworth
“All I know is you turn the thermostat round and
it’ll come on when you want to. You just click it
round and then it fires up.”
“I have to go in the cupboard with ladders etc”
“we go in with a torch”
“it is in a cupboard with the tank and I can’t see half
the dials”
Rathouse and Young, 2004
Treloar, 2006
“…the design and production of a new entity amounts to
a process of configuring its user, where ‘configuring’
includes defining the identity of putative users, and
setting constraints upon their likely future actions.”
Woolgar, 1991
Scripted central heating installations and
why they matter
The installation process is scripted by numerous
heterogeneous actants.
These scripts may be contested or re-written.
This has implications for the potential performance of
domestic space heating practices.
Faye Wade
faye.wade.10@ucl.ac.uk