Video and a Sense of the Invisible: Approaching Domestic Energy Consumption through the Sensory Home

This article proposes and demonstrates an approach to understanding everyday life that takes as its starting point the sensory aesthetics of place. In doing so it advances a video-ethnography approach to studying ‘invisible’ elements of everyday domestic life through the prism of the sensory home. Our concern is chiefly methodological: first, we take a biography of method approach to explain and identify the status of the research knowledge this approach can produce; second, we outline how the video tour as a multisensorial and collaborative research encounter can open up understandings of home as place-event; finally, we probe the status of video as ethnographic description by inviting the reader/viewer to access ways of knowing as they are inscribed in embedded clips, in relation to our written argument. To demonstrate this we discuss and embed clips from a pilot video tour developed as part of an interdisciplinary research project, seeking to understand domestic energy consumption as entangled in everyday practices, experiences and creativities.