On the Introduction of Domestic Technologies into Households

A few interesting considerations to understand how domestic technologies are used and integrated into daily social life from Rode, J., Barkhuus, L., Challenges in Understanding Roles and Responsibility for Use of Home Networking Technologies, in workshop on Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home, CHI 2006.

Home networks, nanny cams, tracking technologies are being incorporated into our homes. We aspire to achieve a social ideal with these technologies (humanist values put into technologies). This paper brings historical and ethnographical considerations on the integration of domestic technologies into the households (with a special focus on genders and social roles). It mentions a few issues that are worth noticing.

Efficiency and Taylorism
With technologies we are bringing the values of workplace efficiency from the workplace into the home. Many households applications are trying to reduce quantifiable metrics. This notion of an efficient home run like a factory is particularly prominent in the design of new domestic technologies and is a challenge overcome as we should value experience over efficiency. At the same time, it has been argued the amount of time American women spent each day on domestic work has been constant since before the industrial revolution despite the technological advances.

How technology is acquired by households
Women look to domestic technologies as a means of controlling situations and minimizing domestic chaos, whereas for men, technology is about control and a means to express expertise (technologies are purely functional, technologies are about features).

Often a role of “administrator” is implicitly given in a household. This leads to disturbing factors such as break downs when the “administrator” is not home or “misuse” by family members such as children.

Relation to my thesis: Introducing technologies into a household is often more about improving efficiency than the experience. We tend to bring workplace value of efficiency into the home. That is, controlling situations and minimizing chaos. The fact that time spent in domestic work has remained constant since industrial revolution suggests that domestic technology results in increased standards (like in the workplace). In that context, aren’t ubicomp humanist values of “calm technology” misplaced?

The dependance on an informal “administrator” of the home technological network is a source of disturbance when the person is not at home.