Architects as educators in owner-occupied retrofit: Situated learning in design interactions

Abstract

Retrofitting owner-occupied housing is critical to achieving decarbonisation targets, yet uptake remains limited. While social approaches emphasise building experts' role in engaging households with retrofit, the interactional agency of architects remains insufficiently specified within energy research. This study examines how architects can enable owner-occupiers to engage with low-carbon retrofit within wider home improvement projects. A micro-ethnographic study combined six observations of early design interactions with fifteen in-depth interviews with architects and owner-occupiers in England and Wales. Participating architects worked in purposively selected micro-practices committed to low-carbon design. Drawing on practice theory, the study conceptualised retrofit as emerging within a nexus of practices. It introduced learning pathways to trace how competences developed through design interactions connect with meanings, material arrangements and further competences in owner-occupiers' practices. These pathways informed reflexive thematic analysis. The most prominent pathway concerned the reconfiguration of worth, consisting of jointly reconsidering what constituted worthwhile improvements within particular projects, especially where retrofit was not initially planned. Developing retrofit competences and managing material risks supported this process, helping owner-occupiers evaluate low-carbon options in relation to their aspirations and existing homes. The findings suggest that architects can bring latent retrofit opportunities into wider home improvement projects by addressing unresolved questions of value and priority. The study characterises architects' agency as relational education, enacted through connecting goals, challenging assumptions and balancing competing priorities. It identifies early briefing as an opportunity for incorporating retrofit and suggests that policy and professional frameworks could provide support for reflexive design dialogue through extended, iterative briefing.