Technology and the Home: Supporting Cooperative Analysis of the Design Space

The home is a complex and (as yet) poorly understood environment. Placing emphasis on production and efficiency, approaches and methods developed to analyze the workplace seem inappropriate to the study of domestic life. A variety of new approaches and methods that are sensitive to the lived realities of domestic life and which support cooperative analysis of the home from multiple viewpoints are required to analyze the domestic design space. An adapted patterns framework for scoping domestic environments, complimented by targeted ethnographic inquiry, is offered as a means of explicating a social viewpoint that provides concrete empirical insights and resources for parties to design to draw upon and use in analyzing the design space.