01 October, 2020. Online event
Discussion
Elizabeth Shove: Welcome everybody. It is great to see so many different backgrounds and people, and as I have just said, we’re going to have some little talks about seasonality. I think we are at the start of what is going to be really quite a big and unexpected programme of inquiry and work. The more we think about seasonality, the more exciting and interesting and varied it becomes but we will see what we get to at the end of this session. So, Mikko, you have 10 minutes or so on seasonality.
[First presentation]
Mikko Jalas: OK thanks Elizabeth. I wasn’t on the previous call so I’m going to say just a few words about myself. I am based at Aalto, the University in Helsinki or in Espoo in the Department of Design and have been kind of using a practice theory lens to study time, temporality rhythms in everyday life, and I guess the kind of natural rhythms somewhere behind their social rhythms or mixing together with the social rhythms has been a long term occupation of mine. I kind of take this, also, as the study of technology so that I see technology as something that kind of is between the natural rhythms and then how we run our daily life. So something like artificial lighting or indoor temperatures or flat surfaces whereby we can move quickly, and all of those are kind of a technological arrangement or accumulations that then make our built environment different than the natural environment. So that also the rhythms of the built environment and the natural environment are different.
I am going to start by saying that we just submitted yesterday a proposal for the Academy of Finland to study how infrastructure services create rhythm. So here I’m thinking, kind of maybe the other way around that we can also think technological systems or infrastructure as kind of like in nature, so that the train network or the electricity grid is something that you know contain some affordances or so and those are typically rhythmic. They are rhythmic and social in a sense that we have the questions of peak demand and then increasing peak load management or demand management, and I’m interested in how the kind of increasingly dynamic pricing of infrastructure services may create some kind of shadow algorithms, or some kind of excess of infrastructure service so that you have the peak loads, you have the prime time consumption, and then you have consumption and engagement that takes place at the kind of gaps and in between the shadows, and whether this is a kind of question of social marginalisation or not. I’m not sure at all. I’m not saying that that people are kind of pushed into the into the shadows of infrastructure access, it may be that many of us are more clever in kind of making use of those opportunities, and so forth. So, it’s really kind of like an empirical question, what is the life like in the shadows of infrastructural success. So that’s the proposal, thanks to Jacopo who is not present and thanks to Elizabeth who is present.
I’m going to say something that has been like an old presentation that I gave in 2012 in Manchester. Dale at least has probably seen it, but I think that maybe it has some relevance still and some fresh thoughts about seasonality. It’s about the particular cold day in late February 2nd, 1999 when there was a national collection of diary data where people were asked to report in a free format way the course of their day. What did they do? What happened? But what is interesting for this particular moment is that it happened to be a very cold day, so northern Finland had minus 40 degrees; Southern Finland minus 5. It’s not very customary to Finland either, so a lot of extra arrangements were taking place. But now I’m going to share my screen. OK, so a few slides from this particular day when it was rather cold and I’m kind of trying to see how life can go on in an extra ordinary, not natural context, but extreme cold.
[Presentation title: Frost habits – normal living amidst cold outdoor temperatures]
[Photo of a thermometer in snow, showing below-freezing temperature]
So, February 2nd, 1999. Temperature in the country varying from minus 2 to minus 30 and snow cover. I could of course pick any kinds of natural phenomena presented.
[Slide showing two maps of Finland. The first map displays temperatures across the country at 6am on 02 February 1999, which range from minus 30 degrees C in a vertical band in the north east corner. Vertical bands of different temperatures, leading from the east to the west show gradually warmer conditions to a maximum of minus 2 degrees C in the south west tip of the country. The second map shows snow cover across Finland on 02 February 1999, the northern third and east side of the country having between 50 and 60 cm of snow, a large part of the central and south of the country with 20 to 30 cm of snow, and the far south west tip with no snow cover at all.]
What is it like? Maybe more interesting is, what has been happening to the temperature, so this is January from that year so it was quite a warm beginning. Then we had a call drop. People get used to winter, maybe during the first drop, then it warms up again. You may be changed back to some practices of warmer winters and then you go back having these drops. I guess this is something that relates to seasonality-that it’s not like we have a winter, but within winter there are, for example, a lot of alterations. So, what happens? How do people cope with the cold?
[Slide show photographs of a well-insulated, welcoming house; a delivery vehicle with caterpillar tracks and snow tyres; and a person sitting in front of a television.]
Firstly, the house or the inside environment is of course logical, but it’s very important that you have a house that is able to, is well insulated enough. If you have that then your problems are far less severe.
You may have delivery services that are better equipped for running at extreme temperatures. You may have mass media or you have mass media that. seems or wasn’t interrupted on that day. There were not breaks of any kind, so some of the infrastructure does look like it’s kind of weather independent. Then reliability is kind of a major issue.
[Slide showing: jump leads; a car with snow tyres; well-lagged pipework; a diagram of pipework buried underground; a large combined cooker and central heating unit; and a bus shelter in a snow drift.]
What do you do to prepare for these kind of things, you have, you know, extra means for starting your car, you have to dig your pipes deep enough, you have alternative heating systems and so on and so forth.
[Slide shows various ways of being prepared for snowy weather: a mobility aid with winter tyres and additional stability; a woman on a wide single ski with a handle and space for shopping bags; crampons on the sole of a winter boot; a child’s pushchair with extra-warm covers; a small child in a very warm, padded outdoor outfit with boots, gloves and a hat with ear flaps; two dogs in warm winter jumpers; and a protected outdoor electricity point.]
Mobility, even if people would be using delivery services, there is a lot of things that they still need to kind of get from outside and there are various ways that you do this, starting of course from clothing. So again, clothing is a key technology here, but also extending to heating up car engines and so on.
[Slide show heated public spaces: a group of seated people attending a talk in public space; a child reading in a public library; four women who work in an office environment; and a street with shops.]
Something that is quite interesting, I think, is that that we speak about public space, but here during this day it’s very important that the public space is heated and warm and cosy. So these kinds of social gatherings on a cold day maybe a bit different than you know, kind of a nice summer day, for example. So winter temperatures, low winter temperatures tend to kind of somehow consolidate some kind of social relations.
[Slide showing scheduled winter labour: a clock face to indicate time; a large combined cooker and central heating unit; a man in protective clothing, a helmet and goggles cutting logs with a chainsaw; a woodshed full of wood cut for burning; and a central heating boiler.]
Scheduled winter labour, so this is also something that is kind of part of the preparedness. So of course, you do a lot of kind of work in order to prepare for the cold day, so that starts from maintaining your equipment. That starts in Finland with people in quite large amounts heating their houses we put on, that requires work all through the cycle. So again, here you think about seasonality and a year you have ongoing winter work that takes place during the whole year just to kind of prepare and be equipped and cope with winter.
[Slide: Coping with winter, details which include winter tuning of the car, buses or taxis; cancelling activities as it’s too cold for walks or visiting the swimming hall; drawing on friends and relatives; proper housekeeping, from ventilation, to pipes to keep water running and washing clothes at night; proper routes in the city.]
What do people do in order to cope with winter? They use the bus or taxi; they cancel activities; draw on relatives; they don’t walk their dogs, but they just let the dog out on a line outside. Proper housekeeping becomes particularly important. There are thoughts of kind of demand response already in 1999, so people are saying that they wash their clothes at night in order to save electricity demand.
[Slide about recalling and re-equipping for the season – there are winter speed limits in October, tyres should be spiked from November, accident numbers peak in January. A graph shows how the total number of injuries to car drivers peaked significantly in January 2005.]
Maybe this is also something interesting for seasonality. How the kind of winter – this is not from the diary data, all the other previous stuff was from the diaries that I mentioned in the beginning, but this is not from the diary, I just took it to better understand how we cope with winter. So, this is about the road traffic, winter speed limits are taking place in October, spike tyres are required in November; accidents peak in January and then decline quite rapidly, so I don’t know what is going on in January at the peak of accidents, whether people have learnt to winter drive every winter again and again, or whether there is some kind of road condition explanation for that. I haven’t looked into this, but I do think that we also learn winter every year again and again.
[Slide showing hot and cold: a photo of a cup of hot tea next to a picture of a thermometer in snow, showing below-freezing temperature.]
Finally, this is more like a sensual or experiential aspect of a cold day. Certainly, there’s the enjoyment of hot and cold being kind of brought together in a way that you experience them both. Either having cups of tea or going to a lake to have a swim in the in the ice, or whatever you do to engage through this kind of experimental mode at least with the winter season.
OK, these were my slides. I hope that it was useful for the seasonality discussion and I am happy to discuss further.
Elizabeth: OK thanks. I think probably the best thing is just to keep moving. So, in preparing for this session, we thought it would be useful to read what’s already been written about seasonality in the social Sciences. And interestingly, there’s not so much, but there is one really classic study, so I’m going to just go through some of the ideas from that classic study, partly because it’s a really extreme case, but because it follows nicely from contemporary Finnish experience, but I think it raises a lot of big questions about the social organisation and energy demand and how that that combination changes.
[Presentation title: Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in morphology.]
[First slide shows simple prints of walrus and a reindeer along with text from Marcel Mauss, written in 1950: “The Eskimo offer a privileged field of study because their morphology (including social relations, material arrangements, houses, patterns of settlement, food, laws, practices) is not the same throughout the year. Clearly the configuration of the land, its mineral riches, its fauna and flora affect the organisation of society, however, nature ‘produces its effects only by means of numerous social conditions which it initially affects, and which alone account for the result’”.]
So Marcel Mauss was basically interested in the kind of structuring of society, not energy, not energy at all, but because he was studying these Eskimos, he was interested particularly in the relationship between the land, the resources that it offers, the nature of what kind of things, what kind of animals were being hunted and eaten. So, walruses in the winter, Caribou in the summer, and how that together constitutes the social environment of the Eskimo world.
[Slide reads: Studies, observations, recordings. Invariant features: where Eskimo live (coastal fringe); a settlement as the unit of investigation – limited size, generations of families. What an Eskimo group needs: Three things are required be every Eskimo group: 1) in winter, a cover of ice, 2) in spring, open water for hunting seal, and 3) in summer, territory for hunting and fresh water for fishing. Complications: “If the ice along the coast is late in melting, seal-hunting becomes impossible. If it melts too quickly because of a strong wind, then it is impossible to venture out in a kayak or to hunt on the ice: since it has begun to thaw, seal and walrus no longer surface”. When winter turns to summer: the skin of the reindeer (a summer animal) may not be brought into contact with the skin of the walrus (a winter animal); the same applies to the various objects used to hunt the two kinds of animal. Seasons are defined by the lives of these animals.”]
There’s lots of detail in the book and I’m only going to pick out a few things. He was interested in, I think this is methodologically, in what’s similar about Eskimo groups and what’s different. What does an Eskimo kind of population need and how is that organised. And some of those features of what’s needed change dramatically over the year. So, in the winter it’s really important that there’s kind of cover of ice, that there’s an open water for hunting seal, and then the landscape changes in the summer. More areas open up. So, the practicalities of living and eating are very closely tied to these sorts of natural patterns about seals and ice and wind and things like that. It’s very interesting, there’s no kind of autumn or intermediate seasons, there’s just winter and summer in this analysis, and that’s tied exactly to the lives of these animals. So, winter begins when Walruses do something and summer begins when reindeer and Caribou do something, that’s how there’s no messing around about the date or anything, it’s just when these things happen.
[Slide showing an Eskimo tent, with accompanying text: “In summer, the members of the settlement live in tents and these tents are dispersed; in winter, they live in houses grouped close t one another. In the tent: a family defined in its narrowest sense of this word: a man and his wife (or, if there is room, his wives) plus their unmarried children including adopted children.” One lamp per family.]
This is really important for the total organisation of this society. So, as he’s saying, in the summer the population, the settlement changes. Basically, it’s just a family group, man, wife, one or two children and then they go off in these tents and they do their hunting and living in this kind of social unit. That is completely different from winter.
[Slide showing plan and section drawings of an Eskimo bunker, with a long, narrow entranceway which leads underground to a large single, more open space. The caption reads: Figure 3: Floor plan and cross-section of an Eskimo house in the Mackenzie region. Both have been redrawn to our specifications because the drawings in Petitot (1876) are plainly inaccurate, while those in Franklin (1828) are incomplete.]
In winter, multiple families come together and live in these kind of bunker type things not actually igloos, but covered in grass with long entranceways and so on. So as Mauss says there is a relationship between the structure of the house and the structure of the group it accommodates and therefore also the time of year.
[Slide with text that reads: “There is thus a close relationship between the structure of the house and the structure of the group that it shelters.” A house holds 6–10 families. Families are considered as separate units, each equivalent to the other. A family consisting of a single individual occupies as much space as a large one comprising more than two generations. During the winter the rules of domestic life are entirely different. Morality, law, property rights (individuals vs collective), including rights over food. “Eskimo have two ways of grouping, and that in accordance with these two forms there are two corresponding systems of law, two moral codes, two kinds of domestic economy and two forms of religious life.”]
In the winter, the house, the wood and brick, and stone structure accommodates multiple families, and because it does that, the rules literally of domestic life are different, what counts as property is different. There’s different kind of forms of morality as well, winter and summer. You can see he’s kind of social organisation of society, but this is not made up. I mean, I think this is fantastic stuff. Can we imagine in contemporary Britain are kind of set of laws and moral codes that flip depending on the seasons? Yes, they have the winter tyre and winter speed limits in Finland, but what about different forms of religious life? Flipping from one environment to another?
[Slide reads: “Social life among the Eskimo goes through a kind of regular rhythm. It is not uniform during the different seasons of the year. It has a high point and a low point. Yet though this curious alternation appears most clearly among the Eskimo, it is by no means confined to this culture. The pattern that we have just noted is more widespread than one would at first expect.” Though this major seasonal rhythm is most apparent, it may not be the only one; there are probably lesser rhythms within each season, each month, each week, each day. The Relevance for us: How did this structure disappear, not only among the Eskimo? e.g. when did laws become year-round rules? What aspects of these extreme variations remain? Are there now ‘hidden’ seasons? What social arrangements hold ‘non-seasonality’ in place? For Mauss: laws regarding the size of groups and intensity of social life.]
So, Mauss is really interesting and a good writer, and so he’s not just describing summer versus winter. He’s interested in the relation between these different configurations and this kind of alteration and movement through these seasonal rhythms and he’s quite keen to recognise that there are other rhythms within that, rhythms within the season, within the day and the week. So, I would strongly recommend – it’s very strangely written, but it’s really great for us. So why was I reading it? I was interested really to wonder when did this, I mean there’s a kind of de-seasonalisation thesis if you like, when did this massively different structure of society on a seasonal basis disappear? So I have no idea when, amongst these communities, laws became year round rules. I would like to know what aspects of this kind of extreme variation remain, and I think that’s interesting in contemporary society.
So, Iacopo will say more and perhaps Dale and Jen will say more about the kind of hidden seasons that percolate through contemporary society. We don’t recognise them as such, but it’s also clear that that all of these are held in place by sort of social arrangements so, there’s some questions about how non-seasonality is configured just as in the same kind of way as Mauss was talking about how seasonality was configured. So that’s my go. Yeah, Eskimos are great. We’ve got Jenn and Dale next.
[Jen and Dale’s work on seasonality]
Jen Whillans: We have not communicated over who is speaking first, do you want to kick off and then point to me when you get stuck?
Dale Southerton: I can do it, yeah, sure. We had a series of sort of conversations, which ended up going a bit like this. We started to think what exactly are seasons and how might we see them or conceptualise them as a first step in trying to think about how you might analyse, and these have all come up. So, there’s one sense, which is, is it related to weather, rain and heat. There’s another sense, is it related to light and dark or day and night. A third sense, which was kind of indoor and outdoor, and then a fourth sense, which is different types of social rhythms, that’s related to calendars, festivals, school holidays, for example, but also what scale might you think about those rhythms? You can think about across a 12 month year but you can also think about what difference these kinds of things might make in the context of a day or week, or whatever your unit of time might be. So, we started to then think about what difference does it make to the things that people do if you have lots of sunlight in a day, and how might those kinds of activities change? So, if you think of time, so I’m particularly interested in activities and time, if you think about this in the context of time, you can think about the duration of activities, the tempo, how those activities are synchronised with who or with what other activities; the timings, so when they actually happen, the frequency or periodicity of those activities and their sequence.
So, we started to wonder what difference, for example, would it make if, in the winter, where there’s shorter hours of daylight, do we see activities disappearing, becoming less frequent, happening at different times; being connected or synchronised with other different types of activities although they stay the same, do we see some activities speed up to fit into what is essentially a condensed period of time, or does none of this matter? Do we see the same patterning of activities in time no matter what part of the year, that is, or does it matter? And if so what kind of seasonality may or may not matter? So, is it a matter of weather, is it a matter of light and dark? Is it a matter of whether activities are indoor or outdoor? Or does it matter more that it’s, you know, we eat, I know that we eat more meat in December and the two months of the year in which we eat the most meats is December and July, or at least the two months of the year in which supermarkets sell the most meat is December and July.
I don’t think that’s to do with whether the hours of the hours of daylight or that we eat indoors or outdoors, because I think July is barbecues, outdoor eating and December is Christmas. So how can we start to explain any variations that we see, or if we don’t see any variations in the patterning of activities, that’s quite a strong argument for de-seasonalisation and then that leads to Elizabeth’s question about how is non-seasonality configured. A final set of questions that that we came up with were: whether or not seasonality matters for the ways in which these kinds of activities that we might see as being patterns are held together or assembled together into what we might think of as social practices. Those are the kinds of conversations that we’ve had, but rather than hypothesise and scratch our heads, why not have a little play around with some of the time-use data, which Jen has done, and Jen’s going talk about that now.
We wanted to just look at, can we see any variation first and foremost, from a quick look at the time diary data, and secondly, what difference does it make? What difference does the sort of dawn and dusk make to the types of activities that are going on because dawn and dusk changes across the year. We had an idea which is to look at the sequencing and timing and what type of activities take place around the arrow of dusk and dawn, or dawn and dusk whichever way round. Jen.
Jen Whillans: Yeah, so I had a little play around with the most recent UK time-use surveys that was 2014 2015. First of all, it’s like a broad brush, what have we got, kind of a scoping exercise. I basically looked at every single practice that there was, broken down by the month, to see if there’s annual variation by month, but then I also kind of collapsed those 12 months down into four Seasons to again, just see if we could see variation by the British seasons.
So, as I say, we looked at all activities an aggregate duration. How much time was allocated to these activities across the day? I looked at the most kind of chunky categories where there’s only nine categories classify all activities, and then I looked and it right down to the most detailed classification, so if you had a real interest in picking berries, mushrooms, and herbs, I can tell you about that level of detail. If you’re not satisfied with the broader categories of physical activity, you could look in more detail at how much time is allocated to indoor sports, outdoor sports, indoor team sports, outdoor team sports. You can really break it down to quite a lot of granularity.
Main findings from this exercise were that none of the variation really could be described as tidal. Any variation that you did see by month and by season was much more subtle, but that’s not to say that there wasn’t any annual variation. I think I would push against the idea of de-seasonality being an end state. I don’t think we’ve reached that, there is certainly variance across the year, but I think it’s much more nuanced and takes a little bit more unpicking to see exactly what’s going on. For example, looking at seasons of sport, you see an increase and, you know, proportional decrease in indoor and outdoor participation in sports. But this is also reflected in viewing of sport on television, so in the summer there was an increase in viewing a sport around the time there was an increase in outdoor sports participation.
So looking across practices to try and tease out some of these more nuanced details, another really interesting one was annual variation in social life and entertainment, and I disaggregated this by men and women. I just wanted to look at how, kind of, seasonality in annual variation was potentially socially differentiated as well. So, for men, the peak participation rate in social life and entertainment was in December – surprise, surprise, Christmas, but for women it actually peaked in August and then also another peak in December. What was interesting about August was that actually there was a decline in the proportion of women participating in paid work. It was also the point at which most annual leave was taken. So then you start to go. okay, well, this kind of annual variation that we observe, we have got to take seriously this idea of social seasonality, school holidays and annual leave and things like that, which are not totally divorced from natural seasonality – obviously school summer holidays are timed with the hottest part of the year, as are people’s blocks of annual leave. So again, this goes back to the idea that maybe we should link time- use data with weather, observation, it wouldn’t be the first time that it’s been done, but I definitely think there’s value in potentially pursuing that.
So that was just the broad-brush analysis. I then took the practice of sleep to see how the practice of sleep is performed differently across the year. And again, in a nutshell, not a huge amount of annual variation actually. So, this idea of daylight and the timing of sunrise and sunset in the UK at least, doesn’t seem to wildly affect people’s pattern of sleep. What was potentially more interesting is that in August, people’s rhythms of sleep were a little bit out of whack, and again that ties in with the fact that people are on annual leave and they’re waking up earlier. Sorry, waking up later and going to bed later than they do in other months of the year and they sleep a lot more in August compared to other months of the year. So yeah, that was my little foray into the time-use data just to have a quick scope of what we might.
I think in terms of taking it forward, it might be more interesting to look in more detail at maybe more discretionary practices, practices that are more obviously affected by seasons, gardening is an obvious one, but then also this kind of indoor-outdoor sports participation. Yeah, so that’s where I ended up from my playing around with the data.
Elizbeth: Our next move, I see Jacopo is here now is to pick up, perfectly seamlessly, the energy implications of some of the patterns that you just described from more of a focus on.
[Theme lead Jacopo Torriti on seasonality]
[Presentation: First slide is a complex graph showing fluctuations in energy demand by energy type between October 2016 and May 2020. Electricity demand shows a similar seasonal pattern for each year, with slightly higher demand in the winter months, but with a reduction in demand during April and May of this year as the COVID-19 lockdown took effect. Liquid transport fuels show a very similar pattern, but with a very marked drop in demand as the pandemic restrictions took effect. The results for the total of gas (less exports) shows marked seasonal variation, with extreme peaks during the winter months, and far less demand during the summer.]
Jacopo Torriti: Thank you so much and sorry for joining the party a bit late. In this slide that you should be able to see, we can the red line represents electricity, national electricity demand and the blue line represents gas, national gas demand over three years and a half between 2017 and 2020 in Great Britain. We have the thin grey line, which stays for all liquid transport fuels. I was hunting for traces of seasonality and basically Grant Wilson at University of Birmingham produced this graph which is great in many regards. It’s basically from a systems level where we see seasonality and we can see the blue line going up and down quite a lot depending on the season and the red line, electricity demand staying fairly stable in terms of seasons. The same might be said about the fuel we use for transport and then you see a drop after March 2020 lockdown measures in place.
[Slide shows two graphs side by side to demonstrate the fluctuation in demand during a day, and the variation in demand per day in winter and summer. The peaks are during early morning an early evening, with much lower demand overnight. Demand for electricity remain more constant during the day, while daytime gas demand shows two distinct peaks. In winter the daily peaks are highest for gas, while in summer, the peaks are highest for electricity.]
So, I ask myself, okay, but let’s look at the stuff we do on demand-side flexibility which looks at intraday variation or week level variation and so it is not necessarily about, how much the minimum and the maximum of demand in a day varies is the same or that gas varies necessarily more, so that also depends on the season. So, for instance, on the right hand here you east on the beast, which was the coldest spot to experience in recent years where gas demand was at is maximum. We basically have that variation between the minimum and the maximum was at its highest for gas, whereas on the left side we have a week in June 2017. What we see is that the difference between minimum and maximum in demand for electricity is that distance in a sense between the minimum and the maximum is higher than for gas. So that I thought that’s a nice way of understanding all the different and, well, some of the different dynamics between seasons in terms of energy demand.
[Slide shows four animated radial graphs. Each graph shows weekly energy consumption on a different low voltage feeder, from 2014 to 2015, with January at the top of each graph. The animation begins in early March 2014 and connects two data points (weekly energy consumption) for each week of the year with a line. The data creates a different pattern for each feeder, giving quick visual clues to energy demand at specific locations.]
We have some data looking at low voltage feeders. This is the South of England as part of the famous Valley Vision project, so feeders might be 80 or 120 households, but there might be smaller shops or schools. The bottom right, you see there, is the clock that follows the different months of the year and we have data for 2014 and 2015. You can see that there are some rhythms which are recurrent in some of the feeder, say for instance, the bottom right, one might have a school strong reductions in electricity demand during half terms and end of terms period, for instance, and other than that, this nice animation really shows you that at still a fairly aggregate level because as I said, this might be 100 ohms or something like that, you can start noticing some patterns, and noticeably, there is a bit of higher demand in winter period, even if it’s electricity now. That’s probably because it’s getting closer to having less industrial electricity demand less over large commercial electricity demand, which tends to be day seasoned coming back to what I understood Elizabeth said while I wasn’t here.
[Slide showing six animated radial graphs, each showing weekly energy consumption at a household level, with January at the top of the circle. The animation connects two data points for each week of the year with a line. The data shows a range of energy demand patterns, showing how different housing has different energy needs over the seasons.]
Let’s zoom in even more, there’s obviously now a wealth of information coming out of smart meter data from London homes and the data was captured as part of a low-carbon London project.
Seasonality might mean different things for different homes inevitably. There’s more spikiness, for instance, the one in the middle and up, the second one from left to right at the top, seems to have higher peaks in different months, and some somewhere just less like the one below that seems less seasonally. Of course, these are just observations on individual electricity demand levels at a small meter level.
[Slide shows how national electricity demand has changed over a decade using data from January and July. The graphs show a relative decrease in midday demand over the past decade, while the evening peak in 2020 is later than in 2006. This change in the pattern of demand is particularly evident during July.]
So, obviously, seasonality will have different effects in different decades in different times of year. Some work we did with Ben Anderson at University Southampton as part of demand tried to look at, for instance, differences in time use data across four different decades. One starting observation just looking at National Grid electricity demand data is that, for the month of July you have a different national electricity pattern of demand, than it was in 2016 than it was in the case of 2006. The black line, which represents 2016, has shifted to the right in the evening. So, the evening peaks happen a bit later, or shifted to later, particularly in the month of July.
Having looked at that time-use data across those different decades, we notice that people in general eat later in the evening, there’s more media news later into the evening as well as you know, many other observations. For instance, middle of the day lunchtime, not happening. So one could ask the question, so how much of these is driven or is connected to seasons or not? And indeed, more research would be needed in this area, so a bit like what Jen presented.
[Slide showing three radial graphs of Care-related activity engagement during a day, with hourly data. The three graphs show the overall average for a weekday, Saturday, and Sunday, with 15:00 at the top of each graph. Tow data points are connected with a line for each hour of the day, and demonstrate the changing pattern of activity.]
I picked with my colleagues some practices that could be seasonal. So we have these clocks that represent 24-hour clock and we have on the left weekday, in the middle Saturdays, and on the right are Sundays. You can see the different months passing by and the different shapes in terms of occurrence or engagement with care practices, how basically how these vary. Intuitively there is something about, you know what Jen said about organisational rhythms and when schools are open. For instance, like September, seems to have quite a high level of care and so does January, but obviously things that people do on Saturday seemed to change depending on the month of the year.
[Slide showing three radial graphs, one each for the overall average activity enagement in household upkeep for a weekday, Saturday, and Sunday. The animations show the variation in when in the day activities take place over the year and the changes according to season.]
Jose looked at household up keeping to show you these nice animations around how these vary between months and whether time of day changes. So, this is about doing repairs, DIY, cleaning and seems to increase during warm months, things like spring cleaning and so on are real than during cold months.
[Slide showing four heatmaps, showing the amount of gardening activity through the year. As you would expect, spring is the busiest season with winter being the quietest.]
My colleague Mate produced some pictures, we thought OK gardening, something which is inevitably seasonal right and so we have this heat map. The blue represents is not much going on and because horizontal axis is the time of a day, of course there is not much gardening at night as one would expect. The red areas are where there are more concentrated activities around gardening and you see what we would expect, so, you know, spring and summer having not only higher levels of gardening but also more spread across the day.
[Slide showing four heatmaps, one for each of the four seasons and the time spent taking part in sport during each season. Interestingly, these show a more even spread, with slightly less acitvity in autumn (October, November, December). These graphs do not differentiate between indoor and outdoor activity.]
Jen mentioned sporting activities, now we didn’t separate between outdoors and indoors, and so actually found quite a spread across, quite a lot of January, February, March that are winter season? Maybe a lot of New Year’s propositions there, and in a sense of less spread sporting activities in the autumn.
[Slide: Time dependence. Text reads: time dependence is defined as high occurrence of the same practice over the same periods of the day. Practices which repeatedly take place at the same time of day are said to be time dependent.]
One way that in the past I thought of seasonality is thinking okay, what if we could capture how time-dependent practices are for us across not only the day, as in how much they repeat themselves, how people perform the same practices around the same time of day, but how that varies during season.
[Slide: Time dependence and the seasons. Six line graphs showing daily activity for the four seasons. The graphs show that food preparation takes place later in June than during the other seasons; the routine for washing does not appear to change; cleaning generally takes place earlier in the summer; washing clothes fluctuates markedly through the year, presumably due to weather conditions; watching television varies slightly, with less viewing in summer; and computer use changes greatly during the seasons, in time spent on the device as well as the time of day.]
[End presentations]
So, to conclude it’s just, you know a suggestion for research and in CREDS Flexibility Theme we are doing work. and Stan and Jose are developing work on a repetition index which is in a sense, consequences of that, how repeated our routine of certain practices are, and clearly what’s the role of seasonality in there?
Just to conclude with this. These are six different practices and you can see consistently, this is 2005 data, as Jen said, there’s nothing tidal about it. Washing clothes seemed to be quite connected in terms of time and dependence with seasons. For instance, there is a lower time dependence in June for most practices apart from washing clothes. I won’t go into too much of details of time dependence work, but it’s one way, of course there could be many, of thinking of how do we consistently think about seasonality?
There is not a single graph from me but my colleagues Jose, Timur and Mate helped me put together the data and all the nice animations. I would like to thank them.
Elizabeth: That’s great, thanks Jacopo. So, we’ve had quite a kind of rapid tour of spinning the topic of seasonality around, looking at it this way and that, with different kinds of data and different sorts of ideas. The purpose wasn’t to come to an answer about what seasonality is and actually these presentations have shown how many different ways there are of thinking about it. But what would be really good and these are always difficult situations to manage. I think what we do is just go round everybody who hasn’t spoken to do a kind of map of what has spiked their interest, or just one thought or observation that might connect with their own work or maybe doesn’t. But that sort of elaborates on the unfolding agenda. Exactly what we do with this remains an open question, but that’s the nature of these exploratory ventures into the unknown. I’ve got a little list which might not include everybody, but I’m just going to go for it anyway. Starting with Nick, he’s first on my screen Nick Eyre, what caught your attention there?
[Comments from the other participants]
Nick Eyre: Lots of things caught my attention, but as always when something catches your attention, your thoughts sort of drift into particular areas. So really two fairly random thoughts to add into the overall mix. I guess the first is because I’m interested in impacts on the energy system and often those are driven by extremes and we saw some examples of the Beast from the East, a very cold day in Finland, and they’re not quite the same as seasonality, are they but they are clearly a function of seasonality and time of day as well. So I mean, I think that’s just something to think about, we may not be interested in pure seasonality as in the average between seasons, that there may also be interest in the combined effect of seasonality – diurnality, if that’s a word, and whatever it is that drives extremes but often that’s weather, which clearly is seasonally dependent. The second thing I was left wondering is, if we’re thinking about energy systems that are, in a way, reversing the trends that we’ve seen in modernity from, towards more reliance on immediately available natural resources. I think that’s a yeah, that’s a broad generalisation, but it’s an interesting one, and clearly the demand on supply systems is a function of both practices and the extent to which resources are stored, which I think you’ll probably tell me is another form of practice, but that’s right, but it’s a particularly important one in terms of the coupling of supply and demand. Should we be looking at other systems, notably, I guess food maybe water as well because they are more reliant even through modernity, they’ve been more reliant on immediately available natural resources than energy as well, because energy’s been using stuff that’s been under the ground for some hundreds of millions of years, so those two. So those are two thoughts and was what I was thinking.
Michelle Bastian: Hi. Thank you. That was really fascinating and I was thinking more about clock time I suppose and how we’re using clock time in the graphs and then the calculations and how it’s being represented in animations. I guess that was what really piqued my interest and I was thinking about how in the animations when we’re seeing the days in Jacopo’s presentation we were seeing the movements around the days, but we didn’t see this sort of movement of the daylight hours. I suppose that everything was getting translated into 24-hour time and I guess I was thinking about older ways of telling time, for example, where you didn’t have standard hours, where the hour was longer or shorter depending on the season.
Things like saying that something happens at the same time in December as it does in June is only the case if you’re using a 24-hour clock. But if you think about seasonal time, you could say, well, this happened 5 hours after sunrise and this happened 3 hours after sunrise, so they’re not the same time necessarily, if you’re looking at it from that perspective. I’m not sure how much difference that would actually make to the work you’ve been doing, but I’m just wondering that it’s not there, or I couldn’t see it there. You probably have thought about it. I was asking Jen in the in the chat about it too. How could we make that more obvious, maybe in those animations. There’s a danger of translating everything back into 24-hour time because it wipes out the very differences that we’re sort of looking for. I suppose if you’re thinking about daylight hours, so if it was in a proportion of daylight hours, does it stay the same? Would that animation look the same as the one put into 24 hours?
Elizabeth: Right, I mean we can imagine Jen and Jacopo’s autumn leaf pictures, you know, changing colour literally as the length of the day changes.
Michelle Bastian: Yeah, and like those clocks, you know, like people that you know sort of artists and designers are doing clocks where you could have, you know the hand takes the daylight hours to go around once and then at the night time hours so the speed of the time changes but it’s just the way we represent these things and I was thinking about a study about butterflies that there was in the news just yesterday about how they study it on the 17 August, whatever it is the same day every year, and they say it’s the same day every year. But for the butterfly it’s not the same day because it was warmer this year because their calendar is driven by temperature, and it was warmer in the spring, their time worked faster this year. So, when you’re translating it back into our calendar time, it doesn’t capture the time that the butterfly’s following for example. So just to draw out that distinction I suppose.
Elizabeth: That’s great, thanks. I’ve got Stan next on my list.
Stan Blue: Hi. Yeah, loads of stuff that I thought was really interesting. I mean, just to kind of name a couple of them, I suppose. History, I thought, was really interesting, and Elizabeth, your example taking the Mauss stuff from the Eskimos, thinking about, I mean that change. Or you know this, not just the change there, but then where does it go and why? And also, how obvious would that change have been to the Eskimos and both the between seasons that are two seasons, apparently? I guess it must be really obvious because you move from outside and above ground and to a different family system to another. But then on the other hand, I’m wondering in another way that those seasons might be, you know, were they really stark or not like that? Is that just where you go? And I suppose that got me thinking about Jen’s point as well when she said de-seasonalisation and thinking about this de-seasonalisation and actually maybe it’s not looking at the time-use data that were not kind of an end point there, I think Jen said.
There is of course going to be international variation as well, and all the rest of it, but this idea that you can see, you can still see the seasons, even if they’re not tidal, is more subtle than that. It got me thinking that actually in some of the other graphs I think Jacopo presented on some other practices that actually it’s different for different processes, for cleaning, for sports, for whatever, they have this is kind of annual variation so it is subtle, but then of course en masse you know those practices are connected and interrelated. So, en masse this kind of is tidal, but hidden by the ways we’re trying to get to it and just as a sort of like connector to that, I thought that Mikko’s point about some of the activity that happens in seasons and that we think of as being for that season, are actually extended through the year. So, you know, the winter work extends through the year, the preparation for the winter. I thought that was really interesting too. And then last, yeah, I also thought the animations are really powerful that Iacopo showed at the end. You know lots of things, like even the total amount of time that’s being given to different activities, how that’s changing on different days? Yeah, and I think that’s really interesting, so I guess for me what I thought though is that some of those things might, what’s interesting is to think about connecting some of those, so you know, how the variation is happening during the week on the weekdays as the seasons change, but thinking about those in connection and then with the history as well. So, there’s, you know, there’s so much coming up really.
Elizabeth: I’ve already said it’s Debbie next and after Debbie it’s going to be Mike.
[Adding climate change into the seasonality discussion]
Debbie Hopkins: Hi everyone, I’m thank you. I really, really enjoyed this and it actually took me back to my PhD. Was on something that was quite different to what I do now and it was around snow and climate and so much of this got me thinking about then how people like climate change and changes in the ski season and snow and when snow was there and when it wasn’t there and what it meant for how people interpreted where they were and so much of? Actually, if you are thinking about climate and climate change, like how seasons are shifting and there is so much of a conversation about whether or not we still have four seasons, the way that we’ve understood them when the season starts, when they stop, and so for certain sectors, that’s really important because it’s when they do particular things and how they organise and schedule when those activities are going to take place, when they’re going to open, when they’re going to close, and suchlike. It’s been really nice, kind of thinking about seasons again and how the assumptions about time, how we might be completely misunderstanding all sorts of things based on these assumptions about time and the structure of seasons, and but I have like 2 things that I really thought about around the seasons and weather and light.
In terms of weather, it was interesting that it was kind of the extremes that we pointed to, and we were thinking about, like, you know, the examples, were extremely cold day, and you know, extremely snowy environments and whatever it might be and how, you know, there’s a reason why extremes become easier to think about and talk about, but I wondered then, given the climate in the UK, I mean we don’t have an awful lot of extremes here, right? We actually have quite kind of blah like mundane, weather that kind of seeps into all seasons and I wondered what that meant for how we then think about seasons, because we still talk as though we have four seasons when actually it’s as likely it’ll be 20 degrees, not well, it’s not statistically as likely, but you know we could have a 20 degree day in October and we could have a 20 degree day in July but they feel very different and what we would do in them would be very different. Then I was thinking about how we enact seasonality through the practices so we just heard from Stan about planning for the seasons and so I was thinking about like shifting, particularly when I was younger, it probably maybe happens slightly less now, you know that my mum would get out different clothes in preparation for the seasons. We’d get out our coats and then if we had an extremely warm day we would just have to wear a coat ‘because it was out now. Or you know, how we get kind of locked in doing particular things, that we have barbecues in the summer, even when the weather is really bad and then we just hold an umbrella and we still do it. And maybe that’s a function of our weather system in the UK because I know in some other countries that would be considered bizarre behaviour and going to the seaside in the summer because you go to the seaside in the summer regardless, and so is that about a seasonal practice that is so locked in that we would do it anyway? Or is it something else about kind of Britishness? Or about the lack of predictability of our climate, I’m not quite sure.
But then thinking about light, so there has been literature in mobility and transport, these to a particular degree around light, around illumination, and in New Zealand there was a lot around this, I say a lot there was some work around this, around kind of street lighting and how that linked to the energy system more broadly, and I think that there’s some interesting things there about what we do and don’t do,, what associations we have, with different degrees of luminosity. So like safety, perceived safety, risk, danger, all of these things, places we will and won’t go, so from a travel, transport, movement, point of view, places that we will go to and won’t go to even in our local areas based on whether it is lit or not. And then what that means potentially for us. You know, say accessing a bus stop if we can’t access the bus stop that’s close to our home because it requires walking down a dark alley which you know, early morning in summer would be doable, but early morning in winter to might not.
The final point was thinking about loitering and you know are we more purposeful, I guess in particular seasons, do we stop and linger and smell the roses in the summer? But in winter we kind of move with more directionality and more attention. And then yeah, from a transport mobility point of view what does that then mean for how we get around in ways that might not be accounted for, and we just talk about modes and we just talk in kind of more blanket terms.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and also maybe destinations. Mike and then Samuele, but Mike is next.
Mike Greenhough: Hello. Hi yeah so thanks for those presentations. It’s really fantastic to be having these discussions around the seasons. It’s very relevant for me because this is what my PhD is all about. So it’s great to have this. And at the moment I’m looking at how social and temporal rhythms figure within seasonal energy demand in my research, and my current research is looking at how the seasons can be thought of as possibly elusive, sort of hidden from maybe some certain sets of data.
I had one prevailing thought from this discussion. We are seeing the overlap between social and natural seasons with, you know, with Jacopo’s energy graphs and the tiniest details that Jen and Dale showed, and Miko and the role of winter, and practices that are embedded seasonally. But these are still sort of aligning with the peaky seasons of what summer and winter can be classed as. I am wondering about the line, I’m wondering about the sort of hidden seasons that might straddle those peaks and troughs of both energy demand and practices. And that also applies to sort of Elizabeth’s Eskimos because, they’ve got such a sharp distinction of when winter and summer starts. And Iacopo’s graphs had the curve of seasonality from low demand in summer to winter. Is there permeation into both spring and autumn? We still have these social and cultural seasons – we have Easter, we have sporting season starting after August, we have October half term in the schools, we have Black Friday which is now a sort of cultural event and that’s taking people out of the house. I don’t know, is there is there anything more going on beyond the distinctions between summer and winter, and I guess I was wondering whether how seasonality is enacted in the way of creating that distinction and how seasonality is defined in that sort of way.
[Final reflections]
Elizabeth: Great. Samuele to be followed by Yohei.
Samuele Lo Piano: Thank you for these excellent presentations. There were several points to take in. The contrast between the cool winter and hot summer, when Mikko was showing his presentation, where you were showing as well, Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking about the underground city, Montreal, Canada or like the hotel in Alaska where people are, in a village in Alaska, actually, where people have shops inside the building, they spend several months without going outside at the time and in that place. And we are kind of facing this dichotomy, light, dark, cold, hot. I think another important element is we consider places there are closer to the equator that do not experience so much variation in daylight but in rainfall, I mean that have a dry and a wet season that changes things completely.
I recall when I travelled to Burkina Faso, I was there in winter but that’s totally dry. Why do they have this type of day of architecture and everything and they told me the winter on the other hand, I mean it’s the wet season. I remember going to the border close to Mali, there was the bed of a river, a huge river, I mean the riverbed was a hundred meters wide but it was totally dry and I was jogging in the river because there was not a single drop of water right there. So, I mean, a point is that seasonality and coupling with nature, I think something we will want to explore is whether moving from a rural context to an urban context, this coupling with nature is removed, I don’t want to say whether removed or weakened, weakened at least because we have seen there are still some seasonal patterns also in that context.
A final reflection is that these especially inspired by the presentation from Mikko and then in terms of infrastructure, you need in extreme circumstances. I remember that in CREDS especially, Jose, Jacopo, there is talk around core capacity. It’s fine, but there’s going to be for sure some need for some redundant infrastructure to face these extreme periods of the years of extreme events. How are these things going to affect accounting? Because probably these are assessed in terms of power capacity rather than accounting in terms of energy, because it takes place at a different temporal scale. But not even in terms of accounting, in Elizabeth’s presentation is how it shapes practices differently with different material, has different elements come into play. I mean that was extremely relevant for the case of the Eskimo but to an extent it applies to other contexts. Sojust to throw in some reflections that it could be interesting to explore flexibility. Thank you for your attention.
Yohei Yamaguchi: Hey everyone, I enjoy your talks and so I had an interest in the seasonality and time use because Japanese time use data doesn’t have any season related information, so I haven’t seen any seasonality in the Japanese time use data. I notice that seasonality has very big influence in time use, so as an engineer I developed a simulation model of energy demand of buildings and I usually assume that people’s activity doesn’t change in different seasons, so now I notice that we have to consider it, but I want to distinguish the influence of the season originated from the change in activity and originated from other factors, so I want to distinguish activity driven change and non-activity related change. And one more thing is the impact of the climate change as Debbie has already pointed out. In Japan we have a very hot summer and temperatures in summer season go up and up every year. so that now people in Japan are trying to avoid spending time outside during the summer daytime. So, this has very big influence. Parents avoid taking their children going out and people spend more time inside the indoor environment. The seasonality has big influence and climate change changes people’s activity and energy demand also. Thank you very much.
Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, indoors and outdoors. I think we’re going to have to have another entire session on this topic, but Greg next followed by Stefan.
Greg Marsden: Yeah, thanks Elizabeth, thanks everyone for your presentations and I’ve always been genuinely interested in why there’s been a lack of seasonality in transport policy, which is the area I tend to work in. But things that struck my interest or maybe areas for further exploration relate to institutional seasonality and where the traces of those are. So, there’s a lot, for example, in winter weather planning in the NHS there’s definitely a seasonality of patterns of treatments and stays in hospitals.
In the transport sector, one of the few seasonal things that we have is we have a December winter timetable for trains, which changes in May to a summer timetable, so we only have two seasons. But whether that’s actually really particularly seasonal now, or whether that’s just down to the difficulty of changing timetables, could be interesting to explore. I’m sure it’s got a history to it. Dog walking on beaches was about the only other kind of activity-based restriction that I could think of that changed a lot, but that does come back to the reflection on holidays, that’s all about when beaches are busy or not, terms and so on. I thought that was an interesting part of the discussion, the kind of rhythms of holidays.
I wondered about financialisation and whether that’s having an influence on homogenising some aspects of practice. So big money, building event venues, accommodation, aircraft. All these sorts of things at once they’re there, they need to be filled, there’s a pressure to kind of fill across the years that we didn’t use to see. The discussion on weather I think was something we have seen in in transport, Debbie picked up on some of that, but it is quite distinct to seasons and the work that’s been done has been quite difficult in terms of actually working out what peoples real exposure was on the routes that they travelled. Also, whether they understood that they were going to get rained on, for example, at the point where they went out in the first place. It also made me think about whether perhaps there are parts of society or users that are more impacted by seasonality than others and how much that might be conditioned or normalised by country and conditions. We know there’s loads of places that colder, wetter, windier and darker on average in the UK, where people cycle more, but that might be because of their expectations and preparedness and equipment. The whole practice of, for example, cycling is quite different, but perhaps the expectations that it’s going to be quite different are much clearer. So, those are the things that kind of stuck out for me.
Elizabeth: A bit of predictability. Stefan and then James.
Stefan Smith: Hello thanks just to reiterate there have been some really interesting talks. I share quite a few of the points which have been raised, so I’ll try not to repeat too much, but one of the things that struck me was the contrast with your presentation, Elizabeth, and Mikko yours in that you have two sort of different setups, one which is working with seasonality and one which is trying to work regardless of that seasonality, and it was with the regardless of seasonality where you have the whole requirement of more infrastructure, and actually the whole idea of planning for extremes and the infrastructure is there to deal with those extremes to allow almost the clock time to rule in terms of what we do rather than the sort of natural rhythms that we see. It was interesting seeing Finish case of winter compared to my sort of experience, not just the UK but of Iceland and what happens in winter there, but the idea of shutting pools, swimming, that’s something you just wouldn’t do in Iceland, there’s geothermally heated outdoor pools and they are open all year, that’s the expectation and it’s news if they have to shut. To me that was just to highlight the differences that we might expect in different cultures and so on, and what might be brought about and why those different expectations are brought about. I think that sort of relates really to what Greg was saying at the end on expectations and sort of picking up on Debbie’s point of barbecues in the summer. Again, in Iceland, you barbecue in the winter and the summer regardless of the weather. because the weather is not going to be good, and you know that, so you’re not planning for the weather, you’re just doing what you want regardless. So, all of that to me was leading to that idea of we try to work regardless of seasonality, and we have some sort of level of disconnection there, and I think lots of reasons around the infrastructure we have in place which allow us to do that, but also sort of those global connections we have in terms of food supplies.
James Wright: Hello nice to meet you. My background and my work is mainly in energy and how to secure the communications networks of energy systems. I think the thing that stuck out to me was Elizabeth’s talk about how the Eskimos sort of changed their rule structure depending upon the seasons, so one of the big points of contention in my work is the rules that sort of ensure the safety of the electrical infrastructure really bite into the bandwidth of ensuring the security of the communications infrastructure that governs it, so that kind of adaptability, and rules, and whether it be like the kind of day in Finland where you have periods, where you prepare for a new season. Energy demands might be then used to kind of give leeway in the sort of security in the safety rules to kind of balance it out in different seasons. So that was my very brief thoughts about all the talks, but thank you very much for the talks.
Nicola Labanca: Hello, thank you. Thank you very much for this very interesting presentation. They were all very inspiring but just a short point. I thought about seasonality also in terms of suspension, the capability of suspending socially the activities during specific seasons. I just wonder whether this social capability of temporally suspending activity could be kept also within a transition to renewables. So, when for example, sudden interruption of the electricity supply might occur and how this social capability could be stimulated and be important for a transition to renewables. That’s it. That’s all
Elizabeth Shove: Okay, but I get the sense, I thought this might happen, I think seasonality is really kind of vibrant field connecting all sorts of different issues, and that with a bit more thought and maybe some more contributions we could really build the kind of seasonality agenda that connects all sorts of different disciplines from energy modelling, time use data, social theory in a way that I’d never imagined or thought about before. And of course, connecting to the kind of long-term renewable energy, short term energy demands, and so at various different temporal scales as well, not just the disappearance of the seasons, as we’ve seen, it’s much more subtle, much more complicated than that.
So we are going to finish this session any minute now, but I think I’ll just say I think we should have another meeting on this topic. We’ve got one on contingency plan for some time, we’ve been deliberately vague about this, sometime in December, depends, that’s the nature of the topic. Maybe we should come back to seasonality with contributions, a bit like we’ve had. I think the little talks work fine to spark off stuff from some of the other people have been here, but who could pick up something, we could just hear again from another three or four people on this broad issue of seasonality? I’ve yet to talk with the boss about that, but we can pick that up later on. I’ll leave that there and say that yes, we are working towards the next one on contingency. We don’t know what it’s going to be about. We don’t know when it’s going to be, but it’ll be in December and Debbie, and Stan and I don’t know who else will be. there. Is there anything more to say? Jacopo?
Jacopo Torriti: Elizabeth I think a brilliant reading room and you’re right about the topic. I came in thinking it must vary, I’m not saying about peaks in Italy that you know now the summer is a new peak season, and you know, I try to stay away from that. I’m thinking mostly of variations in seasonality in terms of time and space, but the dimensions are so many that it really deserves further attention.
Elizabeth Shove: I can see a special issue coming up. We will let you know when the next one is, sometime in December. See you all again soon.
Banner photo credit: Steph Ferguson