Experimenting with the Social Life of Homes: Sensor Governmentality and Its Frictions

ABSTRACT

Smart devices are invading everyday spaces like our bedrooms and living rooms, making it possible to conduct new participatory experimentations in the ‘real world’. An example is the National Housing Monitoring Network (Red Nacional de Monitoreo, ReNaM). By installing networked sensors in homes in different cities in Chile, ReNaM seeks to generate a large public database on the environmental behaviour of homes in real life conditions and throughout their life cycle, in order to make data-driven policies and regulations on sustainable building. In this article, we argue that experiments with digital innovations like ReNaM are moving towards a ‘sensor governmentality’ or a mode of sensitive regulation of household behaviour at a distance, recomposing the relationship that the State establishes with its population. However, we find that this sensor governmentality is multivalent, fragile and friction-loaded. We analyse different scripts present in ReNaM and the frictions that emerge between divergent ways of materialising this sensor network from above and below. Moreover, the real environmental conditions and behaviours that the experiment seeks to capture through sensors are always challenged by the multiple entanglements that sensor devices unfold in domestic spaces, suggesting that affective and collective possibilities in these real-world experiments should be considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Real-world experiment
• data-driven decisions
• citizen sensing
• domestic appropriation
• speculative sensing

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers, guest editors and Science as Culture editors for their valuable comments. We would also like to thank Gloria Baigorrotegui for her observations on an earlier version of this article. This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico N° 1180062, and Proyecto Fondap N° 15110020 / Centro de Desarrollo Sustentable (CEDEUS).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico: [grant number 1180062].

Notes on contributors

Martín Tironi

Martín Tironi is a sociologist, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2006. Master in Sociology, Sorbonne V, 2010. PhD, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2013. Post-doctorate, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2014. Visiting Fellow, Center for Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018. His research areas are anthropology of design, digital devices and technologies, and urban infrastructures. His work has been published in The British Journal of Sociology (2020), Journal of Cultural Economy (2018), Environment and Planning D (2018), among others. He exhibited the installation “Ashes of coexistence” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Biennial of Medial Arts 2019) and is currently preparing the curatorship of the Chile Pavilion for the London Design Bienale (2021).

Matías Valderrama

Matías Valderrama is a sociologist and Master in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His currently working as a research assistant on the research project (Fondecyt, 2018-2021) titled ‘Dataficación of urban environments and individuals: an analysis of the designs, practices and discourses of the production and management of digital data in Chile’. His research areas are Digital Culture, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Social Movements, Digital Methods and Social Network Analysis, among others.