Abstract for presentation at the International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR), Åbo Akademi University, University of Turku, Finland, 30 July – 1 August 2014.
The DEMAND research programme has an underlying principle that energy is used in the course of accomplishing social practices. Theme 1 of DEMAND is analysing time use data to understand how social practices, i.e. ‘what people do’, impact on the timing and flexibility of energy consumption, whether people are at home, travelling around, at work or at leisure. This paper presents geographic visualisation of time use data funded by a commercial consortium, including the Trajectory Partnership and Nokia. The research design was overseen by the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford. The data collection took place from May to November 2011. The analysis makes use of an urban-based (London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff , Glasgow) sample of 244 respondents (649 days of data in total) who had GPS devices which recorded if they were stationary for more than 2 minutes, while asking questions about what they were doing and who they were with. The data is aggregated to every 10 minutes for analysis purposes, and contains 37 codes classifying respondents’ activities.
The objective of the geovisualisation analysis is to contrast the social practices, work and travel patterns of households with / without children, including the relative extent of working from home. In order to understand what people are doing and where during peak periods of the day, a range of geovisualisation tools are employed to generate snapshots of the time-space distribution of activities.
University of Reading, England, University of Dublin, Ireland, University of Aberdeen, Scotland