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Curious Home
The Curious Home experience was formed to reconsider and refocus
work undertaken within the Domestic Experience. We wanted to build
on insights they had gained about supporting curiosity and
exploration in the home. We also wanted to explore new issues as
well: how to design products comprised of components that may be
distributed in the home; the deployment of toolkits that would
allow designers, and perhaps even users, to create systems more
easily; and the linking of information that comes from in or near
the home with that found on the internet. The initial explorations
culminated in the design of three new pieces (the ‘Boundary
Devices’) that explore these issues.
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Meanwhile, the computer scientists in Nottingham were developing
a system to support the development of new ubiquitous computing
experiences by designers and – ideally – members of the
public. The Equip Component Toolkit (ECT) eased the creation of
networks of devices and software modules, allowing data to flow
among them according to rules and patterns defined onscreen. The
design and computer science agendas complemented each other well:
ECT helped the design team achieve their goals, while their
practical experiences provided valuable feedback to the development
team about bugs, redesigns, and powerful features.
Over time, interest converged on how information and awareness
flows within, through and beyond the physical boundaries of the
home. Related to this, we became intrigued by how local information
might be combined with the more placeless information of the
internet to augment the experience of both. The Boundary Devices
explore these issues in a variety of ways. Like all the designs we
have produced for the home, the first priority in their design is
to create compelling experiences that people will appreciate over
time. But they serve a deeper agenda as well, seeking to uncover
and enrich an experience of place for the home in this age
of all-pervading, universal information.
A slideshow of photos from the Curious Home Exhibition in July 2007 is available here. Featured Projects
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Proposals and Explorations
Initially, the Curious Home experience extended the work of the
Domestic Experience by refocusing on the ecology of objects in our
homes. Workbook Three focused on the lifecycle of objects in our
homes and how our possessions actively shape the meanings we give
our lives. Covering a wide range of issues, observations, and
feints towards design, the workbook uncovered a wide space for
future investigation.
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Boundary Devices
The boundaries of the home are a problematic topic for domestic
technologies (Tabor, P., ‘Striking Home: The Telematic
Assault on Identity’ in Hill, J. (ed.), Occupying
Architecture, Routledge 1998). Many new technologies focus
within the home, ignoring, perhaps wilfully, events outside. Others
seek to blithely dissolve the walls of the home, opening it to a
vast sea of information from around the world. A third approach is
to rigidly protect the physical boundaries of the home with
technologies of surveillance and alarm. All three approaches tend
to ignore the home as a place set in a nested set of increasingly
larger neighbourhoods (“My Home, 23 Main Street, Islington,
North London, England, UK, The Earth”). As we pursued
proposals, technology and experience investigations, we began to
gravitate towards ideas regarding how to blur the home’s
boundaries to expose a new sense of its place.
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