ROUTINE AWARENESS. Another element of the visibility problem is that people are aware of a variety of features of their home as a ‘matter of routine’. Here is an example: Xxxxxx notices that there are regular temperature drops in the kitchen on certain days. Xxxxxx: The reason that leaving doors open is another thing that affects the temperature readings. Xxxxxx leaves the garage door open when he’s working out there. When I’m not there to keep shutting it”. Xxxxxx ‘forgets doors are on hinges, born in a barn really’. Xxxxxx agrees that it has a really big effect. Xxxxxx plans to change his behaviour but then suggests an adaptation – adding hinges to the garage door because it was a fire door. “I’ll have you house trained in no time on this, this is great.” In this particular example one of the two inhabitants of the home, Xxxxxx, is inspecting the output from the temperature sensors in her kitchen. She knows as a complete matter of routine that her husband, Xxxxxx, likes to have the door to the garage open when he’s working in there. The door to the garage opens onto a short corridor that itself leads directly into the kitchen where the door is always open. She also knows as a matter of routine the times and days Xxxxxx particularly likes to work in the garage. Looking at the output from the sensors she can see that these two things coincide and this is enough to prompt her account for what is causing the temperature drop. Indeed, feeling a temperature drop alone, elsewhere in the house, at those times, was frequently enough to provide for this account as a reasonable account. Despite the fact that there are often quite sophisticated understandings involved in how people are aware of one another’s routines and use them as a resource for reasoning about what specific phenomena might amount to, an equally important part of them being routine is that they would never dream of making them an object of comment or concern (see Xxxxxx et al, 2002 for a xxxxxx exposition of this point). So, what is taken to be worthy of remark in the above example is not the business of Xxxxxx working in the garage (though it might be if he suddenly did it in the middle of the night). Instead the observation about the routine here makes available other possible objects of discussion, such as the impact his routine is having on the temperature in the house, the implications of this for the consumption of energy, the need for him to remember to shut intermediate doors when he’s going to and fro, and ...
