PNNL

Abstract

Home energy upgrade decisions are encompassed within space making choices related to functional comfort, domestic practice and emotional wellbeing. Isolating technological and economic rationalities of home occupants inhabiting a house, instead of exploring subjective rationalities of households striving to create a home, produce limited actionable insights about cognitive processes of home energy decisions. Using semi-structured interviews of 121 households, we investigated the compounded and nested decisions constituting the sociotechnical phenomenon of home upgrades. Alternating decision and decision-maker lenses of inquiry to understand households’ rationality and sociotechnical environments’ rationality-shaping influences, we found that energy decisions were entrenched within larger domestic space making decisions and dynamics, and that they occurred at the intersection of decision dilemmas and sociotechnical environments. Thus, home energy decisions are cognitive processes bounded by space-making aspirations and technological choices, moderated by a feedback mechanism consisting of sentiments, peers, information, limiting factors and self -identities.