Caring for Batteries: Maintaining Infrastructures and Mobile Social Contexts

This paper advances the study of batteries in everyday life. We provide a situated understanding of smartphone battery care based on a qualitative user study involving device logging and behavioral tracking to support our inquiry. Our findings depict how caring for batteries fits into everyday routines, the work that is done to prepare and maintain an infrastructure that supports mobile energy needs, and the ways in which batteries are monitored and preserved. Moreover, they illustrate what happens when everyday routines are disrupted and when planning or infrastructure fails, causing flat batteries and the need to apply mechanisms for coping. We build on these insights to propose shifting the research focus from user and device centric approaches towards more contextualized understandings of situated practices. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for two increasingly important topics within HCI, personal informatics and the Internet of Things (IoT).