About me: Having recently completed an MSc in energy policy at SPRU (the University of Sussex) this ESRC funded studentship is allowing me to continue my interest in the role heating technology plays in shaping our everyday lives. For most of my MSc work I focussed on innovation and technological change in housing and utility service regulation. My final dissertation focussed on the role of change agents within developmental niche clustering of low-energy social housing and attempted to highlight the now sadly dwindling value of investments in this area.
Prior to this I completed a BSc in Physics (University of Reading, 2006) and worked in various roles across the musical instrument industry.
My research: My current research project is taking an unconventional ‘bottom-up’ and anthropological view to thermal comfort in office spaces through ethnographic methods, direct industrial partnership and a spread of applied academic disciplines. The work is challengingly and enthrallingly interdisciplinary and is aiming to synthesise a view of offices as people in their environment, as opposed to the more objectively formed view of offices as people and an environment that has been implicitly presented within the literature to date.
I hope this project makes a contribution towards our understanding of how our use of technologies in the built environment creates and shapes overall energy demand, and the role this environment and the technologies employed play in direct energy reduction.
Supervisor: Michelle Shipworth and Hannah Knox
Pathway: Social and Policy Studies of Energy and the Environment
Location: UCL Energy Institute
Email: luke.taft.17@ucl.ac.uk
