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Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) like Google Home provide automated news, media and other content directly into the home. In this article, we outline how Google Home’s content delivery can support the wellbeing and independence of older people. We argue that automated media provided by DVAs enrols older people in a dialectic relationship with the automated content and feminised conversation they deliver, uniquely performed within people’s own everyday life circumstances. We demonstrate this by drawing on ethnographic insights generated during a trial of smart home technologies with older Australian households who are ‘ageing in place’ in regional New South Wales. For most participants, the trial was their first encounter with DVAs and the modes of media and content delivery including for music, news, weather, trivia, jokes, facts and images. While DVAs bring new experiences via content, communication and companionship, they are also subverted, ignored or transformed as people improvise to make them ‘fit’ within their homes and lives. These dynamics underpin how DVAs, automated content delivery and user’s interactions can support people’s sense of wellness and their independent daily practices at home.

This article examines the potential of a novel card game method designed to provide insights into connections between mundane everyday practices and renewable energy generation. The method was developed as part of an ethnographic project exploring Australian householders' experiences of weather and climate and evaluating their impacts on everyday practices and localised energy production. The card game drew inspiration from other similar methods and exemplifies intentional underdesign. Such design describes deliberately unrefined research methods meant to provoke participant engagement and playfulness because they are incomplete, irrelevant, or inadequate and thereby draw out tacit and unexamined lay expertise. Examples from the project reported in the article show how the card game method facilitated conversations revealing how weather knowledge and understandings inform awareness of renewable energy availability and practices that depend on it. We conclude that the card game method can help researchers explore relationships that exist across weather, energy, and practice. We also propose other areas where this method and intentional underdesign could generate more productive insights for geographers and others in allied disciplines.

HCI research involving older adults has typically focused on improving technology skills, mobility and health outcomes. Technology for positive ageing emphasizing creativity, inquisitiveness and resourcefulness is less commonly explored. This article builds on this research to contribute an understanding of the importance of curiosity, play and experimentation in supporting positive wellbeing outcomes for older adults living with smart home devices. The research was conducted in regional Australia by an aged care provider and two universities. Twenty-three households participated in the interdisciplinary in-home ethnographic and technological smart device trial that included voice assistants, robotic vacuums, smart kettles and smart lights. The article discusses routines and interactions involving these devices, which resulted in wellbeing outcomes that built participants' digital living skills. These fndings inform concluding recommendations about how to design smart home devices, aged care programs and services involving emerging technologies, to support positive ageing.

Emerging energy technologies and tools aim to enhance peoples' understanding and control over household energy. Yet, important questions are emerging about precisely whose understanding and control such technologies benefit, and how increasingly commonplace tools may shape the gendered division of domestic labour. This article explores how smart energy technologies, and in particular energy feedback, may reproduce or further entrench the unequal distribution of household labour between men and women. Theories of social practice are used to frame ethnographic research (semi-structured interviews, card game prompts and home tours) conducted with 24 Australian households using solar photovoltaics and batteries. Evidence is provided of men interpreting energy feedback for other household members, policing other householders' energy-using practices and more broadly orchestrating patterns of energy consumption. Building on the concept of 'digital housekeeping', which refers to the gendered way in which domestic technologies are used and maintained, the paper suggests these practices constitute gendered forms of 'energy housekeeping'. The energy housekeeping concept provides a means of understanding how emerging energy technologies and tools intersect with issues of gender and domestic labour. 555 Martin Buildings and Cities