Researchers from all seven projects met in Manchester for the SPRG Autumn Away Day (13-14th October). This was the first opportunity for the SPRG research community to meet in the nine month period when all seven projects are running concurrently. The Away Day was a chance to think across the projects and to identify conceptual connections and tensions. Inter-project work means taking the comparative approach of the SPRG programme seriously and locating areas of key impact that the practice perspective brings to the field of sustainability and behaviour change.

Day One was spent listening to updates from representatives of six project teams and sharing methodological and conceptual challenges.

Sam Brown reported on the progress of the Keeping Cool project. Discussion explored how room temperature acts as a junction at which multiple practices, such as dressing and eating, meet. And how 22 ̊C is becoming embedded in material culture, through, for example, the optimal operating temperature of IT equipment. Gordon Walker updated attendees on Zero Carbon Habitation: next steps involve interviewing engineers, architects and product designers. How are they embedding zero carbon into houses? How do they relate to imagined future users and their practices?

Ben Anderson and Alison Browne discussed the challenges of ‘practice hunting' through their survey work on domestic water consumption. The project uses conventional methodological techniques in novel ways and aims to develop a monitoring and evaluation tool tracking shifts of practice over time as drivers of water consumption.

The Bottled Water Consumption and Markets project posed the question: is bottled water and non-bottled water comparable given radically different needs and practices in the project's research sites in Delhi, Mexico City and Europe? The project suggests viewing sustainability at the intersections of infrastructures, economies and practices.

Changing Eating Habits is in the initial stage of project development. The project will involve a cross national comparison of processes of change in eating practices, addressing three contexts of consumption: weight loss; migration; and changing habits for a political or social cause. In examining dynamics of change it will address the question: what kind of change is implied by a move to ‘sustainable eating'?

Day Two saw a roundtable discussion on how practices are being understood and how sustainability is addressed within the projects. It was clear that the SPRG draws on the notion of ‘practices' in a number of differing ways with productive tensions between them. How practices take hold and become durable and conversely how malleable and open to change they are were key themes to emerge.

The last project presentation from Sarah Parry set the scene for a final session on ‘SPRG Interventions'. Engagement, Interaction and Influence is both a research project looking at case studies where social science has informed policy and engagement project, informing the SPRG's stance to policy intervention in general.

What would an SPRG-inspired policy intervention look like? Participants split into groups to brainstorm ideas. Responses ranged from using workplace regulations to re-order the rhythms of daily life, to engaging with those responsible for modelling demand in industry and policy settings. The systemic scale of the challenge of sustainability, and the need for mechanisms and policy interventions commensurate to that scale emerged as a key theme.

The event saw intense engagement between participants on common conceptual challenges, methodological innovations and practical applications - a successful part of the ongoing process of making the SPRG more than the sum of its parts.