Human activities at the frontiers of ambient climate control: Learning from how UK shoppers and sport spectators currently talk about air-conditioning

This paper is concerned with ambient climate control as an increasingly common means of managing the degree to which local weather conditions and seasonal temperature changes are allowed to complicate human activities. Our focus is on summertime shopping and sport spectatorship in the UK as activities that, though often still imaginatively associated with the outdoors, may increasingly take place in comparatively controlled indoor environments. We begin by arguing for an examination of these activities according to the many ways in which those involved might relate to climate control when the experience of air-conditioning has often been studied in terms of thermal comfort. Then we present the findings of two interview projects that developed this argument. The first involved shoppers on the Oxford High Street in view of how retail air-conditioning entails a growing amount of energy use in this country. The second focused on spectators at the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in view of how one court there now boasts a retractable roof that renders match conditions newly controllable. We find that these respondents connect climate control to ideas of societal progress and effective scheduling more readily than to any desires for greater personal comfort. We end with the implications for those hoping to encourage less energy hungry societies and for researchers interested in how best to study the relationship between climate control and everyday life.