A Sensory Autoethnography of Energy Practices in the Home: An Exploration of Combining Smart Meter Data with Situated accounts of What Energy is For

Energy providers and government institutions encourage residents to adopt (retrofit) smart solutions. This creates a form of smart-paternalism that shifts agency over everyday decisions from residents to algorithms, deciding what is good for them based on averages. The aim of this paper is to formulate design guidelines for future research that takes inclusion of marginalized groups as a starting point for a just energy transition. Based on the observation that quantitative energy data misses important information to understand what energy is used for, while ethnographic approaches tend to brush over relevant technological details, we performed a sensory auto-ethnography that links sensorial and situated accounts of what energy is (not) for to smart meter data. We use the findings to argue for enabling residents' situated understanding of how their everyday practices relate to their actual consumption and formulate guidelines on what both residents and designers need to do so.