The gender of smart charging

With the growing focus on the home as a site for life, work, and energy generation and demand, home batteries of many kinds are increasingly ubiquitous. Batteries play a dual role of everyday emerging technologies (which can be used for something) and infrastructure (which enables other things). This article considers how batteries become technologies and infrastructures both for the accomplishment of practical everyday life activities and routines in the present, and imagining future everyday life. A design anthropological and ethnographic analysis of 72 Australian households with a focus on four demographically diverse women is used to investigate the gendered discourses concerning the future of battery charging; new and emerging everyday gendered techniques and routines of battery charging and their entanglements with women’s priorities for socialities of care and wellbeing. The implications of these findings are considered through the lens of recent feminist approaches to technology and technology design, together with future charging scenarios.