Other Homes

The problem

Existing design research has studied homes as static and conventional environments shared by normative “nuclear” families in single-detached houses.

This work expands the way researchers think about, approach and design for all homes.

Building on multiple studies based in the field including my own masters’ thesis, an ethnography about collective living (i.e. where a group of strangers come together to share and form an intentional community in one house), I worked as a Research Assistant at the Everyday Design Studio on this unique project. We analyzed qualitative data to reconceptualize domestic spaces in creative and inclusive ways.

Other Homes is an ongoing body of research by the Everyday Design Studio (EDS) that explores unconventional living environments.

During the course of this body of research, we looked at several unconventional types of domestic environments including:

• Collective houses
• Van dwellers
• Boat living
• Tiny homes
• Minimalist/Zero-Waste homes

Methods

• Ethnographic fieldwork for a holistic, extended qualitative exploration

e.g. Deep hanging out

(Creswell, 2007; Fetterman, 2009; Miles, Huberman & Saldaña, 2014)

• Interviews with collective households
• Walk-through of households
• Analysis: Nvivo, axial coding & affinity clustering
• Participant recruitment via snowball sampling and social media outreach
• Speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013)

Fictional Futures

Using a speculative design approach, we built on our initial ethnographic studies of “other homes” to create six fictional future technology concepts that aimed to (i) critically reflect on and provoke questions about commitments in current mainstream visions of domestic technology and (ii) explore new possibilities for engaging with the material, social, and technological conditions shaping the lives of our collective and mobile dweller participants.

Select Outcomes

Since conducting our research, our work has been published in multiple academic Human-Computer Interaction design research journals and presented at conferences. My ethnography of collective living was published as my master’s thesis.