Archive of Wavematters
Indrawan Prabaharyaka
My colleagues gifted my newborn daugther a radiant heater, a device I use almost everyday throughout winter when I do the routine before the long night sleep: washing her at 6 PM. The heater comes with an automatic 10-minute off-switch. But I often forget the standard factory setting—not until the prelinguistic little human complained and told me to manually turn on the heater again. Each time this nonverbal communication moment happens, I wonder, since when and in what ways humans learn about thermal comfort? One might argue following Peter Sloterdijk that it begins from the sphere of the womb. Once born, a (modern) human moves between one thermally conditioned bubble to another, each is shaped by urban planning, architecture, and design whose norms and forms are shaped by standards and classifications, like what Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star have beautifully written about.