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Abstract

In a post-pandemic context, everyday life, technology and media have become increasingly focused in the home. This has implications for how people will live with automated and smart technologies in possible futures, for electricity demand, transition to net zero emissions and ultimately planetary health. Here, we explore these unfolding circumstances through the prism of notifications, and their capacity to mediate uncertainties while enabling people to engage in anticipatory modes of home organisation which ensure their physical comfort and produce a sense of ontological security in pandemic and climate crisis situations. In possible futures, the notification may vary from its current characteristics, but would enable people to engage with everyday automated technologies and systems in ways that acknowledge values of place, safety and care.

Keywords

Air technologies design ethnography energy everyday life futures notifications

Introduction

Will the COVID-19 pandemic be viewed retrospectively as a wake-up call which reminded us to care for our environment, or will it mark a period from which new environmentally damaging everyday life practices and automated technologies have emerged? We hope it will be the former and suggest research in everyday digital futures, along with reframing the relationship between our current moment and the pandemic, can assist in achieving that. This involves dismissing visions of the world as pivoted at the edge of a precipice, plagued by a contemporary moment of pandemic-augmented climate crisis, which can be solved by technological innovation. Instead, we need to understand ‘life at the edge of the future’ (Pink, 2023) through the sites of the everyday, and to reframe what it will mean to move forward with technology in everyday life.

In this article, we take the smartphone push notification as a prism through which to explore possibilities for everyday futures in which public, household and planetary health are aligned. We must discuss these processes relationally – from whatever disciplinary context or everyday site we wish to address the pandemic – and studies of media and communication in the home are no exception.

Climate change (and global practices that contribute to it) is plausibly understood as having constituted the very circumstances in which the COVID-19 pandemic was possible at scale. As Zorana J. Andersen and colleagues advise, ‘The COVID-19 pandemic has painfully demonstrated the close interconnectedness of a fossil fuel-based economy, climate change, air pollution and emerging infectious diseases’ (Andersen et al., 2021: 4) and is thus a visible global articulation of the relationship among public health, air quality and climate change. The Australian example is especially illustrative since addition to some Australian states experiencing some of the longest pandemic lockdowns in the world in 2020 and 2021, in Australia people face threats of deadly asthma thunderstorms (Kenner, 2018), and due to bushfires and their smoke the country’s urban air quality is worsening, while in other countries it is improving (Morawska et al., 2021: 10).

As people, communities and nations have learned to live with the pandemic, everyday life has become increasingly focused in the home, with an increase in the number and use of home technologies and media. In Australia, this includes growth in the consumer market for air purification and filtration technologies as people seek to keep themselves and their families healthy and safe at home (as well as the installation of air filtration systems in schools and ventilation systems in organisations). However, while new air technologies and their promise of clean, healthy and safe air might help to protect us from airborne viruses, pollution, allergens and mould (see Pink, 2023) they do little to protect our air. More air technology generates greater demand for materials and electricity to produce, transport and power it, which in turn, in the absence of a large-scale transition to renewable energy sources in the immediate future, will contribute to further climate change, and thus damage our planetary air further. Even though emerging technologies, like air purifiers, are very energy efficient, purification is becoming increasingly embedded into heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in ways that may change and extend their use and energy demand.

This raises the question of how we can protect ourselves and our air at the same time (Pink, 2023) since if the right balance between these two needs is not met, carbon emissions are likely to increase. However, there is no singular problem–solution mode of addressing this situation. Rather, to move forward sensibly we must listen to the possibilities that emerge from everyday ethnographic encounters with people in the futures they can sense and imagine themselves experiencing. We must create new connections between the possibilities afforded by future automated technologies, communications devices and systems (such as, but not exclusively, smartphone push-notifications) and everyday human imaginaries, expertise and action.

Our Digital Energy Futures project (2019–2023) which we draw on in this article, undertaken during the pandemic, found that people wish to keep control of when air technologies are used, and when they can access electricity to do so, precisely due to their roles in keeping households healthy and safe. Rather than relinquishing control of their existing and future everyday technologies, energy systems and their home itself, people want to be informed. People want to be able to use their own sensory ways of knowing about the air in their homes in relation to air and weather data and broader energy issues and to stay in control of decisions relating to caring for and keeping their households safe and healthy. As we show later, when we asked them to create their own visions for future home technologies, the notification figured strongly in people’s everyday imaginaries.

These findings diverge from the dominant industry model of the ‘set and forget consumer’, who reaps convenience benefits by leaving home automation to seamlessly manage their home devices and energy systems (Dahlgren et al., 2021). Could this tension between the industry vision of fully automated systems and people’s desire to stay in control of their homes instead suggest a notification future, where the model ‘set and forget consumer’ is replaced by a ‘set and notify person’? In this possible future, might new notification landscapes (Licoppe, 2010) become the principal media through which people expect to engage with everyday automated systems and devices? And how could this become a mode of participation not only in making one’s own home life comfortable, but one that would be aligned with a wider participation in the future of planetary health that reduces the risk of manifestations of climate change such as global pandemics, bushfires and asthma thunderstorms? Such notifications might not be precisely the smartphone push notifications we currently experience, but they offer a starting point for interrogating this question.

In this article, we draw on our findings to suggest the notification may play a role in mediating uncertainties and enabling people to imagine and potentially participate in anticipatory modes of home organisation, which enable them to feel comfortable physically and retain a sense of ontological security in times characterised by public health and climate crisis. In this possible future, the notification may not be precisely what it is now, but redesigned to enable people to engage with everyday automated technologies and systems in ways that acknowledge values of place, safety and care. The design (Akama et al., 2018; Pink et al., 2022) and futures anthropology (Pink, 2023; Pink and Salazar, 2017) approach we engage to discuss this draws on phenomenological anthropology (Ingold, 2000), to understand the everyday as sensed, contingent and improvisatory, and continually emergent in the present (Pink et al., 2016) and as we ‘feel’ possible futures (Pink, 2021b). We investigate in and through possible experienced futures, rather than simply undertaking an anthropological study of the future. We do not seek to deliver recommendations for future notification design, but rather, through the notification we examines how technologies and media might be shaped to fit possible everyday values, priorities and feelings in as yet unknown futures.

We develop the discussion as follows to: introduce the notification, outline our approach and methods for investigating everyday futures, discuss how participants in our research situated notifications in possible air futures, outline the implications of our work and argue that future manifestations of the notification should be understood not as acting on the everyday but within processes through which people participate in the future everyday.

Notifications

Existing research about push notifications has evolved primarily in human–computer interaction (HCI) and digital journalism fields, where it is seen primarily as a nudge or an alert. In HCI, the notification has been defined as ‘a visual, auditory, or tactile alert designed to attract attention’, in the form of ‘a visual representation that is typically found in a pop-up or a notification center’ (Iqbal and Bailey, 2010, noted by Pielot et al., 2018: 2.2). HCI research about notifications is often quantitative, applied and informed by behavioural theories or intent, whereby notifications have been studied for their effective delivery and management (e.g. Pielot et al., 2018). Notifications are thus seen as ‘nudges’ towards ‘behaviour change’ (e.g. Purohit and Holzer, 2019; Thaler and Sunstien, 2008) in diverse fields, including weight loss programmes, road safety, active mobility, health interventions, waste management and energy use (although evidence demonstrates ‘nudges’ do not change behaviour; Maier et al., 2022). In digital journalism, media scholar Gerard Goggin notes, ‘Alerts now often take the form of notifications, a pervasive, ambient aspect of everyday media specific to the smartphone and apps’. Goggin highlights the ubiquity of notifications, in a contemporary ‘newsscape’ where they cannot be easily suppressed as they ‘seep through’ smartphone lock screens urging users to attend to them (Goggin, 2020: 170).

In industry, according to a Wired magazine article (Goode, 2019), over the last two decades, notifications have ‘become a problem’, reporting from a study by Synapse (a notification management app maker), that ‘modern smartphone users receive more than double the number of notifications per day than they think they’re getting – as many as 73 per day’. The technology industry appears committed to notifications, as a positive mode of providing people with what they want or need to know, underpinned by a vision of technology helping people (interview with Matius Duarte of Google, in Goode, 2019). Such notifications could be interpreted as a manifestation of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. However, HCI and media scholar Christian Licoppe fruitfully suggests that ‘Rather than denouncing notification systems as the sole nexus of a whole new form of attention-based exploitation’ (Licoppe, 2010: 289), we might ‘study how such unreflexive cognition-action chains are geared to more complex forms of individual and collective involvements’ (Licoppe, 2010: 290).

Recently, news journalism studies report that short-term use of notifications can increase app use and may increase learning (Stroud et al., 2020). Notifications are considered beneficial for society and for journalism with regard to their potential to restructure how temporality and spatiality are conceptualised in communication processes and offering direct access to audiences according to their preferences and from trusted sources in a context of increasing disinformation (Wheatley and Ferrer-Conill, 2021: 695). Notifications alone have been demonstrated to be insufficient when a relationship of trust does not already exist (e.g. between new editors and seasoned editors) (Ford et al., 2018: 3800), and both trust in news content and engagement with audience preferences are emphasised. A mobile ethnography in regional Finland emphasises ‘people are not passive receivers, a static target, but active information processors and learners with multifold individual preferences’ (Mäkelä, 2020: 83). Missing in much research about how we live with push notification is what Mäkelä et al. (2020: 83) frame as further development of shared value through co-creation between ‘customers’ and ‘providers’, or in a design anthropological frame, attention to how people shape and imagine their own uses of notifications.

In the energy field, approaches to engage people as consumers of energy are represented by two dominant modes: ‘set and forget’ (Harper-Slaboszewicz et al., 2012), where automation largely takes care of any demand management associated with increased renewable energy generation or high demand on hot summer days, and ‘prosuming’ or more active energy management, where people receive notifications to provide ‘eco-feedback’, or to respond to price signals or other demand response initiatives (Strengers, 2013). These notifications are typically delivered to personal devices like smartphones and are seen as positive as they have a lower ‘response requirement’ for users, and can form part of an ecology of eco-feedback mechanisms which when, respectively, ‘precise’ and ‘meaningful’, ‘promotes learning’ and ‘promotes motivation’ (Sanguinetti et al., 2018: 66). Generally, in the energy and social science literature notifications are treated as efforts to change energy use behaviour, rather than studied as a representational device that might become an active participant in everyday life (e.g. Sanguinetti et al. 2018; Wemyss et al., 2019). However, social science scholars have highlighted the limitations of conventional energy feedback and emphasised other forms of sensory and material feedback people draw on in their everyday lives to make sense of their routines and practices (Hargreaves, 2018; Strengers, 2013).

Part of the issue, which the energy notifications example highlights, is that such approaches frame notifications (involving financial and/or consumption information) as solutions. This, when coupled with the idea of a climate crisis, in which some researchers and industry actors believe that notifications can nudge people towards better sustainable behaviours, elevates the status of the notification to being a fix which ultimately contributes to an antidote to a crisis. This logic follows a paradigm, where technological solutions are thought to solve societal problems (Morozov, 2013), or as a socio-technical imaginary (Jasanoff, 2015) where people respond as expected in technology-driven change processes. However, understandings of push notifications as a fix are flawed in their reliance on behavioural theories, their definition of the climate ‘crisis’ as a problem that can be fixed and the absence of a theory of everyday life within their agendas. Through research in the everyday sites where people engaged with smartphone messaging notifications, Licoppe found that in fact, users of notifications ‘themselves continuously shape their “notification-scape” and modulate the force of the notifications that might occur in a way that is reflexively tied to the accomplishment of their activity and that displays different regimes of involvement’ (Licoppe, 2010: 290). Licoppe invokes Marc Auge’s (2008) ‘“theory of the event” that negates its very eventfulness’ to thus focus on ‘the situated management of notification landscapes, which is continuously adjusted to changing circumstances’ (Licoppe, 2010: 293). This usefully complicates the use of notifications as tools to be applied in energy transitions where in fact people engage with notifications in varied, located and contingent ways embedded in their ever-evolving situations. Yet, the notion of notification landscapes itself remains rooted in a narrative that sees smartphone notifications as participating in the management of everyday life activity. Here, therefore, we go further to suggest the reflexive ways notifications are actually used in everyday life affords a new opportunity – or requirement – for us to recast their role in co-constituting futures and to reconsider the relationship between their representational and non-representational qualities (i.e. between the content and experience of media and technology).

To understand the role of push notifications in sustainable living in a world where the imprint of the COVID-19 pandemic is here to stay, we need a vision of change that accommodates the everyday. This involves dissolving the assumption that we are in a crisis of heightened uncertainty that is pivoted to tip over, acknowledging that our enduring circumstances are of perpetual uncertainty (Akama et al., 2018) and rejecting the notion of crisis as a historical precipice (Roitman, 2013) which requires a solution. Thus, we define our present moment as happening within a process of climate change of which the COVID-19 pandemic is part. Once we dislodge the singular moment of crisis – or a crisis event – exacerbated by the pandemic, upon which our human future pivots, the logic of a technological solution which can fix the crisis and climate change evaporates. It requires us to build into our ongoing futures, technological interventions that people will engage with, that they can imagine as fitting into their future lives, which will enable them to move forward in ways that are meaningful to them, and in situations in which they trust (Pink, 2023). In possible futures, modes of notification may have different sensorial and affective qualities and meanings to smartphone notifications as we know them now, and they must accommodate the contingency of everyday future living, and the improvisatory modes through which people will engage with the ongoingly emergent circumstances of the everyday. Notifications are not ‘nudges’ or ‘alerts’; these are just two categories of notification, rather than being qualities of the notification. Future notifications will need to have new qualities.

Researching everyday futures

Our research investigated how people felt about notifications and used notifications as an idea through which people might think and sense possible futures – as something familiar participants might take into an uncertain future with them.

Investigating notifications requires attention to their sensoriality (how they sound, look and vibrate), how they are related to people’s embodied and sensory relationships with their environments and the ways of knowing and sensing this entails (Pink, 2015b). Phenomenologically, notifications are part of the ongoingly emergent everyday environments that we live, sense and know in, as well as being representational devices which seek to communicate specific or alternative information content about the environment (such as air pollution or pollen count). This makes notifications a curious phenomenon: because they obviate the tension between the representational and non-representational which pervades phenomenological approaches to media (Pink, 2015a), and thus imply a fieldwork site that invites us to ask research questions about what people would expect from future content and how they would perceive notifications as part of their future experiential world, and how they might shape their own engagements with them in such futures. We focus on the latter, since our interest is how notifications were thought of as part of imagined futures, thus translating Licoppe’s (2010: 300) call for the ‘study of the pragmatics of notification devices’ to possible futures. This focus emerged from research participants’ wishes to imagine notifications as part of their mundane futures. Notifications were on our research radar, from the energy research (Strengers, 2013) noted earlier. However, design anthropology is not hypothesis-led; we followed the ‘ethnographic hunch’ (Pink, 2021a) that notifications would participate in how imagined futures were experienced, and present a basis for creating new foresights regarding automated futures.

Researching automated futures presents a challenge for the social sciences, which we address through the conceptual and methodological approaches of futures anthropology (Pink and Salazar, 2017) of emerging technologies (Pink, 2023) and design ethnography (Pink et al., 2022) to understand our everyday worlds in the present and in possible futures as ongoingly emergent sites in which people continuously improvise to creatively move forward through the minutiae of mundane, routine and contingent everyday circumstances. We discuss the findings of stage 4 of our project, a series of design ethnographic futures workshops designed to generate everyday imaginaries of futures with householders. These workshops took place online in 2022, with 42 participants, over 10 sites, selected to reflect diverse localities across the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales. Fifty percent each of participants were women and men, 59% were aged 29–44, 29% were aged 54–64 and 12% were aged over 65. Seventy percent of participants owned their own homes and 30% were renting. Twelve percent had experienced hardship, 10% were unsure and 78% had not. Sixty-nine percent were born outside Australia. These workshops were preceded and framed by three research exercises: a qualitative content analysis of 64 technology and energy industry reports an ethnographic study of 72 households, and an ethnographic documentary film Digital Energy Futures.¹

Based on these studies, and in collaboration with energy forecasters we identified optimal areas of focus through which our foresights would contribute to forecasting (discussed elsewhere), selecting three themes to explore further through design ethnographic futures workshops: future mundane life at home with air technologies (discussed here); future everyday local life with electric vehicles; and how everyday routines might shift in far futures. The focus on future air technology was selected for two reasons: heating and cooling, which use the majority of energy in the Australian home (40%) and are the major contributor to peak electricity demand, have long since been concerns for energy forecasters and the industry in general, and sales in and use of additional air technologies in homes – air purifiers, filters and dehumidifiers – have intensified during the pandemic, as evidenced by our ethnographic study and market reports.

There is an emerging practice of engaging people in participatory, co-design and speculative methods to investigate energy futures in homes, ranging from Mike Michael and Bill Gavers’ (Michael, 2016) speculative energy babble home installations to anthropologist Hannah Knox’s researching energy futures through a propositional mode (Knox, 2021: 84). Framed by ongoing COVID-19 restrictions and the need for online contingencies, we developed an online workshop to explore our three themes. The air technology workshop stage involved participants designing a new technology to create optimal air quality in the home. They envisioned and described the qualities that would comprise ‘perfect’ air for them personally, in their own home. They then used a simple template to design a future air technology that could be used to achieve those conditions, named their technology and used symbols and lines to illustrate its form, functions and level of automation. These devices had the potential for heating, cooling, purification, filtration and additional functions selected by the participants. They could be operated manually, could be automated or could be third-party controlled. To explore possible tensions between the wider electricity grid and future household air technologies, we drew on a ‘thing ethnography’ approach (Giaccardi et al., 2016) to develop a ‘thing interview’ (Nicenboim et al., 2020; Reddy et al., 2021) method where participants role-played from the perspective of the technology they had just designed, pretending to be their ideal ‘air technology’ while researchers role-played the perspective of the electricity grid. The role-play was designed to help participants shift out of their present lives by ‘being’ the technology looking out onto their household members in the future in negotiation with sometimes conflicting priorities of the wider energy systems in their area. It surfaced participants’ values and practices by exploring how future air technology would mediate power relations, trust, care, privacy and automation and how it would moderate flows of data, air, electricity, allergens, pollutants and payments. Some participants found it easier than others to slip into this role; however, in all cases, the shift to the futures mode enabled us to investigate how people imagine air technology as integral household companions in their possible futures, and with reference to notifications, how they would like their relationships to this technology to be mediated.

Figure 1.

Screenshots of participant-generated future air tech, including varied functions like purification and filtration.

Imagining future air technologies

Our ethnographic study found participants were increasingly concerned about keeping the air quality in their homes clean, safe and healthy, and in the wake of the bushfires, pandemic and for reasons including allergies or humidity, they were investing in air filters and purifiers. Australians already employ diverse and (sometimes) successful strategies to maintain thermal comfort in what are generally poorly insulated homes (Moore et al., 2016; Strengers and Maller, 2011), and during the pandemic, they managed heating and cooling in the home to suit working from home, such as by moving from room to room according to the time of day, season and weather circumstances. The focus on home during the pandemic made fitting together the rhythms of weather, home and work still more important, meaning participants were often articulate about how automation and notifications might participate in this. While they would agree to some degree of automation of their home energy supply and air technologies, generally they were not opting, or planning, for fully automated and connected smart home systems. They wished to control and to have an ‘override’ ability over automated systems.

Setting our design ethnographic futures workshops findings against this background, we wished to understand what this desire for control meant for the future of home air technologies. The increase in people’s desire to manage their air quality through new technology creates new energy demand, and the possibility that future technology would perform air conditioning, purification and filtration meant that energy demand for such devices could increase, potentially at times of the day that put pressure on the electricity grid, particularly during extreme weather events (heat waves and cold snaps), asthma thunderstorms, bushfire pollution or further lockdowns. People’s relationships to home automation could be crucial to how such energy demand is managed in the future, since in order to ensure that the electricity grid can cope with increased demand (potentially exacerbated by more air technology) it is argued by energy network businesses that some degree of external control will likely be required in the form of ‘direct load control’ or incentivised automation (Strengers, 2013). Thus, the question of how to engage people with such systems and generate relationships of trust in relation to air technology is an underpinning concern for energy companies (Strengers et al., 2019). Three key themes emerged from our workshops: local knowledge and ways of knowing the environment; caring and keeping your family safe and healthy; staying in control; and managing the home. The following examples demonstrate how these are pivotal in informing how people imagine the future relationship among automation, notification and control.

Knowledge of the local environment was fundamental to how many participants understood the possibilities related to automation and notification. For example, both Al (in his 50s working in the technology industry) and Richard (retired but active as an academic) lived in spacious homes in a beautiful coastal location. Their local weather system was fundamental to their lives in their homes, which, since they and their wives worked from home, needed to be appropriately heated or cooled on a continuous basis, across multiple work and family spaces. Both participants emphasised the significance of the breeze running through the area, being near to the coast, and the hills, and how this differed from the urban environment of Sydney, where both worked. Yet, their slightly different circumstances meant their needs differed.

Al lived lower down, nearer to the water, where without the circulation of the local breeze, it can get a bit humid, while Richard’s house was on the hillside. He described the local air as clean and cool, while there was sometimes smoky air from back burning in their area. Al also had an air purifier with its own cooling function, which they bought during the pandemic to help with his son’s allergies, supporting him in study at home. Al designed a device that he named HealthSmart2030, to accommodate his family’s specific needs regarding temperature extremes, allergens and smoke pollution. The way Al anticipated the technology working was complex and related to his knowledge of what it felt like to live in his area. For heating and cooling, it would depend on the season and the wind. His main issues relating to air quality were bushfires and when, he said ‘sometimes the breezes themselves have an impact because if it’s early spring and you’re in a hot day . . . and the pollen’s starting to fly around on the wind’. He anticipated that HealthSmart2020 should come on at such moments, with ‘a sensor that says there’s a certain amount of smoke in the air or pollen in the air, then it would turn on automatically, but otherwise it wouldn’t be needed except for maybe just a bit of air flow’. Al would be happy with some degree of automation. For instance, if he was out ‘for ten minutes . . . then [it would] automatically close the windows, and seals the building down’. But he insisted he would want to be involved and ‘have the ability to be on my phone, if I’m out, or in the home’ and to be able to override the automated response, to ‘say . . . it’s a bushfire down the road, it’s been under control for the last 15 minutes, they’ve just put it out, don’t lock up the house, it’ll blow through it the next 10 minutes’.

For Richard, up on the hillside, the breeze was integral to how he managed the air in his home – since cool north easterly breezes in the afternoon, acted as an air conditioner during part of the year. He characterised the local air as warm, clean, fresh and natural, and better than Sydney’s air quality. Richard didn’t rely on AC or purification, except for heating during the colder winter temperatures, since he has rheumatoid arthritis. He also has possibilities other than using AC, for instance, during the bushfires he avoided poor air quality by staying in his Sydney apartment. Richard would not normally use air purifiers, but they keep a small one in their bedroom, a Christmas gift from their daughter-in-law which they use weekly, not because they believe it is needed, but because it was thoughtful of her to give it to them and they do not want it to go to waste. Thus, Richard’s starting point was a strong understanding of local air, the possibilities of breeze and AC, as well as experience of air purification and its technology and the social expectations surrounding this. Richard designed The Weather God. He lived in an architect-designed home and the aesthetics were very important to him, so he chose a very minimalist and streamlined design, and subtle and small sensors. In discussion with Al, we added password protection to both their speculative devices. The Weather God was designed to ensure that the home was warm enough for Richard’s medical condition while providing the cooling his wife needed in hot weather. He would benefit from the technology’s purification/filtration functions, as he explained:

I would like to measure the density and danger of the bushfire smoke, because on the one hand there’s the obvious one where you just look at how thick it is but in fact it gets dangerous before it gets really thick.

He agreed he would be happy to have the windows automatically closed and opened by a smart system in such a situation but said he would like to receive an alert about the density of the smoke, and that smartphone notifications would be good for this.

While both participants agreed to limited automation in response to invisible threats that they could manage if they needed to, they would prefer to be aware of the information sensors could detect, and to control how responses to this were managed in their homes. Other rural participants, like Al and Richard, who had lived in their local communities long-term, had similarly deep knowledge of their environments and usually used this to ensure that they maintained the right air quality and temperature in their homes for themselves. Participants recognised the relevance of sensor technology to be able to detect pollution. For example, a participant living in a coastal area felt notifications could play a role in alerting her if there was as yet invisible smoke that she could not yet smell or COVID virus in the air, which, for her, was ‘yeah that’s like something giving you a warning’.

However, generally participants were reluctant for sensor data to be directly translated into an automated response in their home. As one participant, speaking in the role of the Air Tech said, ‘I think my family would be mad with me if I closed the windows and they specifically left them open for a reason’. They valued using their own local judgement rather than depending on remote data. Here, the idea of notifications was again invoked. Instead of windows automatically closing in relation to air quality threats, a participant suggested ‘an alert message, a notification, just letting me know there’s pollution detected in the house, you might want to close your windows’, ‘definitely’ another participant echoed. They emphasised uncertainties about predictive and remote air quality data sensing, which would not account for smoke from a neighbour’s bonfire (common in rural areas) and that ‘the weather can be very hit and miss too . . . weather can be different between 2 villages only a few minutes apart’. For these participants with deep knowledge of their environments, the notification was the key medium through which communication about air quality threats should happen, and families should be given the chance to evaluate their responses, rather than having decisions made for them by automated systems.

Keeping oneself and one’s family safe from polluted or contaminated air was paramount for participants and their concerns were framed through the specific health conditions and needs of their households. For example, in our first workshop a rural participant emphasised the need to acknowledge any medical issues required to guide when the house should be purified and when windows should be automatically opened or closed. This made us ask how households would manage their air quality with their safety and health in mind. This question recurred across participants in different locations. For example, a city-based husband and wife who had lived in Australia with their children for approximately 4 years invented an air quality (filter, purifier and dehumidifier) and heating and cooling device named CleanAir/iClean which would protect household members from bacteria, viruses, mould and dust, and which could deliver an ‘air quality warning’. The device would be controlled by them via a smartphone app, with which they would pre-set it if they were out. This future technology would have sensors triggering alarms or alerts to remind them to ‘change the air quality accordingly’. As the husband put it, the sensors would ‘at least notify – we don’t want to give away full control . . . what I had in mind was mainly sensors to detect’ and to either adjust the air quality ‘or at least send out notifications’ if the air quality isn’t good. He elaborated that he would ‘expect there to be an app connected to it, it would notify what it’s doing, I do not want it to make its own decisions, at least I definitely need to know what it’s doing, and sometimes I should have the autonomy to override’. As his wife emphasised, ‘certain things we use our own intelligence’. As another urban couple, also migrants to Australia, stressed, how notifications are delivered is important. The wife explained that she received far too many notifications, some of which were senseless and irritating. But she would find acceptable a ‘suggestion to use some natural cooling or heating’ such as ‘instead of just running my air conditioning, like at 2 pm if this is a peak consumption time, I would be more than happy to just roll down the blinds or create some air flow’. But she emphasised,: ‘it should be really friendly, it shouldn’t be patronising’.

The interventional possibilities of notifications

Notifications are not standalone solutions to environmental problems. As our discussion evidences, their future possibilities need to be discerned not simply from what people said about notifications, but from wider stories about their lives, their homes, their relationships with others, and with their feelings about automation and control. Notifications, in whatever form they might be manifested and articulated in futures, will moreover likely form part of wider technological, media and communications ecologies, and how these are aligned with future living.

As our participants presented it, the air quality notification was a realistic technological possibility which would generate meaning and action in future everyday life. Yet as people become increasingly concerned about their air quality at home and use emerging air filtration and purification systems in response to this, there is a risk that these actions could ultimately slow a transition to decarbonisation, and in doing so further damage the air itself. Our research shows that people are concerned about air quality; they want to prioritise the health and safety of their families and households, and they want to stay in control in ways that acknowledge their local environmental knowledge and family health needs and priorities. People are already skilled in staying in control of and with notifications, in Licoppe’s (2010: 300) sense of managing notification landscapes as ‘a situated, artful accomplishment, sensitive to the particulars of the unfolding situation and reflexively tied to the production of intelligible forms of involvement in relevant activities’ (Licoppe, 2010: 300). However, once notification landscapes are situated in possible future everyday life with its contingencies and values – of care, and safety – the nuances of how people will live with notifications come into closer view.

Our participants indicated that notifications of the right kinds, that alert them to possibilities, threats or opportunities that they would not otherwise have been able to know or sense themselves, would be welcome. We also learned that they want to be participants in the process of keeping themselves and their families safe, rather than the recipients of automated decisions made by external systems which would determine when to open and close their windows and when to divert their electricity elsewhere. Thus, the ‘set and forget’ assumptions about consumers originating from the energy sector are unlikely to eventuate, but so too are the assumptions that people will actively engage with, and respond to, energy, tariff and climate data without a broader environmental context, and wider attention to people’s everyday concerns and needs around air. If designed with and for people, as participants in decarbonising their everyday and planetary air futures, rather than with the intent to change their behaviour through ‘nudges’ to fit an external scheme to transition to decarbonisation, the air quality notification could become an effective device. Thus, energy companies wishing to pursue climate reduction or energy demand aims with regard to air technologies may achieve better outcomes by understanding people as engaging in ‘set and notify’ interactions with their air devices and other home technologies. People’s interest in automation is always contingent on the place-based and health-focused circumstances of their lives and homes, and notifications about their local environments, accompanied by tailored control may prove more viable.

Reframing notification futures requires interdisciplinary effort. From a media and communications perspective, notifications are representational devices, with communication and informational imperatives. The design of their content is therefore crucial; as our participants suggested, in pandemic, extreme weather and bushfire situations, their priorities lie in the safety and health of their families and households. Content needs to engage with the everyday narratives through which people tell their own stories of future air quality. From a phenomenological anthropology perspective, notifications may also be understood as an experiential device, which occurs during the flow of life, in the middle of an everyday routine, when someone is out for 10 minutes, during an online meeting when working from home, or any other moment. It involves a sensory encounter with technology which rather than ‘stopping’ the flow needs to be designed to be experienced as part of life, and as a way of participating in life in the future continuous present. The question of how the content and the sensory and affective dimensions of future notifications might be delivered or encountered should be open to modes of speculative digital practice. For example, Chuan Khoo’s (e.g. Khoo, 2018) speculative sculptures present environmental or online data in sensory forms, and thus make it accessible in the flow of everyday life. We might look to such practice to learn further about how to go beyond what is currently imaginable.

Conclusion

The notification is an everyday reality and a prism through which to imagine possible futures. Research participants indicated that smartphone push notifications would enable them to live comfortably with new air technology and automated systems in possible near futures. How then might notifications contribute? How might we understand the work they do? And how might we view them as societal technologies for constituting a future in which we protect both ourselves and our air, in a future world where pandemic circumstances and climate change–related extreme weather and hazards may require everyday management rather than responses to crisis events. We have focused on how the notification might enable people to actively participate. However, questions remain: how might notifications participate in transparent, just and equitable access to air quality and energy for individuals and communities while also caring for the air itself by ensuring the health and safety of our planet through a commitment to decarbonisation?

While the notification might not inhabit our everyday futures in the same form as we know it now, or as energy companies expect it to unfold in the future, its role in how automated futures in climate change are navigated, negotiated and experienced seems crucial. The notification has potential to mediate uncertainties, enable people to participate in anticipatory modes of home organisation and feel comfortable physically and retain a sense of ontological security in times characterised as public health and climate crisis. Thus, in a future where we need to reduce energy demand, a ‘set and notify’ approach to energy and home technologies would be more effective than the currently touted model of ‘set and forget’ or behavioural ‘nudge’ approach. ‘Set and notify’ acknowledges the everyday work people do to shape their notification landscapes, know their local environments and care for their households. ‘Set and forget’ incorrectly assumes that people would, for convenience, relinquish this to an automated system, and behavioural nudges fail to acknowledge the everyday work, ways of knowing and caring that people perform.

We must depart from seeing the ubiquitous smartphone push notification as we know it now as a possible device for alerting and nudging people during airborne pandemic threats and other air quality events. Rather attention to the notification indicates the need to understand such media as embedded in the experience of mobilising and acknowledging local knowledge, creating personal and family safety and enabling modes of participation that enable people to feel that they are in control of their own lives while contributing to planetary futures.

Footnotes

First,we thank all research participants for making our research possible.

Authors’ note

All authors have agreed to the submission and that the article is not currently being considered for publication by any other print or electronic journal.

Ethical approval

The ethics for the Digital Energy Futures project were approved by Monash University’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article: The research discussed in this article is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding Scheme (‘Digital Energy Futures’ project number LP180100203) in partnership with Monash University,Ausgrid,AusNet Services and Energy Consumers Australia.

ORCID iD

Sarah Pink

Author biographies

Professor Sarah Pink is a design a futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She is Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University.

Professor Yolande Strenger s is a digital sociologist and human-computer interaction scholar. She leads the Energy Futures research program in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University.

Dr Hannah Korsmeyer is a design researcher. She is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University.

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