Playing games with the weather: A card game method for engaging households in conversations about renewable energy generation and everyday practice

Abstract

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.

Energy housekeeping: intersections of gender, domestic labour and technologies

“…Additional material came from home tours, photography and captioned photo diaries (16 households), the latter involving an open-ended task where participants shared their experiences of weather and energy in the week following the research visit (for a similar example, see Hitchings & Day 2011). A novel card game method was also developed to explore participants' lay and embodied knowledge of weather and energy (Martin & Strengers, 2022). The game involved participants sorting cards with weather phenomena (rain, sunny), embodied experiences (sticky, uncomfortable) and associated descriptors (consistent, unpredictable) into broad seasonal categories, and talking through their placements.…”

Valuing the archive for research and learning and teaching in geography

“…Robson et al (2022) provide an important analysis of the ways in which local government is engaging with ideas about planetary health—not least in terms of climate change. Martin and Strengers (2022) show how use of a card game can elicit insights from participants in a study on everyday practices and renewable energy generation—which also touches on concerns about climate change. That work is followed by a comprehensive analysis of Australia’s Chinese diaspora in which Tan and Liu (2022) argue for nuanced understandings of demographic change to inform “retention strategies in Australia concerning diaspora groups that can enhance economic and social inclusion.” While much of the diaspora to which they refer is based in cities, different change‐dynamics are examined by Plummer and Argent (2022) in an incisive work about the wool industry and path dependence and relative resilience of four rural local government areas in Western Australia.…”

“Ideas are really…” – supporting collaborative dialogues and community of practice for innovation via CO:RE cards

“…They allow collaborative experimentation among participants to contribute towards a shared language, aim or goal (Peters et al, 2021). According to Martin and Strengers (2022), when cards are integrated as a conversational tool during group discussions, they uncover the tacit knowledge about a particular subject or topic of participants. Cards can also support the "sharing of individual mental models in conversational turn-taking" to facilitate collaborative knowledge integration (Yeoman and Carvalho, 2019 p. 85).…”