Home Cultures_at Home With Media Technology

HOME CULTUBES VOLUME 7, ISSUE 3PP 263-286

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KATE CHURCH IS A LECTURER AND RESEARCHERIN THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

PROGRAM, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE ANDDESIGN, ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE

OF TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY (RMIT).HER RESEARCH EXPLORES NOTIONS OF

"TEMPORARY-NESS," DISTURBANCE, ANDTRANSITION WITHIN URBAN SPACE.

JENNY WEIGHT LECTURES IN NETWORKEDAND PROGRAMMED MEDIA AT RMIT

SHE RESEARCHES ETHNOGRAPHIC ANDTHEORETICAL ASPECTS OF NETWORKED AND

PROGRAMMED MEDIA AND THEIR IMPLICATIONSFOR MEDIA PEDAGOGY.

MARSHA BERRY IS AN ARTIST AND ARESEARCHER WHO IS SENIOR LECTURER IN

THE SCHOOL OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION,RMIT UNIVERSITY. HER CURRENT RESEARCH

INVESTIGATES MOBILE MEDIA, URBAN HELDS,GEOPLACED KNOWLEDGE, AND MEMORY

THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DESIGN.

HUGH MACDONALD IS A PHD CANDIDATE IN THESCHOOL OF MEDIA COMMUNICATION, RMITUNIVERSITY. HIS PHD RESEARCH IS ON THE

TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIAON THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE.

KATE CHURCH, JENNY WEIGHT,MARSHA BERRY, and HUGH MACDONALD

AT HOME WITHMEDIA TECHNOLOGYABSTRACT People's engagement withmedia devices in the domestic sphere variesgreatly, as do the decisions they makeregarding when, where, and how the devicesare utilized. How do we organize our housesfor media consumption and/or creation?How do our houses' spatial configurationsaffect our media consumption and habits?How does time play a role in mediaengagement? These questions directlyrelate to designour homes are bothspatially and temporally designedby us,and for us. The design issues of creatingand maintaining a "home" are compoundedby the various media devices we usetelephone, TV, stereo, Internet-enabledcomputer, and so on. We not only "design"how we use these devices, but whereand when they are used. In this context,media devices are not passive objects, butrather through our engagement with them,they alter domestic space/time, and may

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KATE CHURCH, JENNY WEIGHT, MARSHA BERRY AND HUGH MACDONALD

ultimately challenge how we understand and definedomesticity. Media technology simultaneouslyconstructs new, and interrupts existing, domesticterritories. We will explore the reciprocal impact ofdomestic space/time and media technology, witha view to revealing the ways in which this nexusbecomes a question of design.

KEYWORDS: mobile technology, domestic space, media, design,hertzian

INTRODUCTIONThe way we live in our houses is the result of many small andsome large decisionssome retrospectively, in response tomedia gadgets we have purchased, while others are more

proactive, to "make room" for media gadgets. As a lived environment,"home is perceived as an intersection where ideals and practices ofarchitecture, industry, policy, advertising and media texts come to-gether with private activities and interpretations of dwellers" (Soronenand Sotamaa 2004: 223). Whether it is a matter of proactive design,or a retrospective retro-fit, incorporating media technologies in thehome impacts on domestic space and time.

Although often so ubiquitous that it goes unacknowledged, mediaengagement in the domestic realm is fraught with many issues. In thisarticle we wish to unpack and interrogate some of the decisions thatwe make about domestic media technology, and what they do to ourunderstanding and engagement with "home."

In particular, this article focuses on revealing and articulating thetensions and solutions that result from the increasingly complex en-gagement with media and media devices in the early twenty-first-cen-tury Australian home. Domestic media technologies are an intrinsicpart of contemporary life; they impact upon our personal relationshipsand the way we structure our day. Some media technologies seem topredetermine the space they must inhabit (because, for example, theyare too large to move around or they require a power cord). However,fixed technologies are giving way to more portable devices such asnotebook computers and MP3 music playersif you have a portable

13 music device, not only can you listen to music anywhere, but also atD any time. As advertising campaigns from the 1960s about portable^ television imply (Spigel 2001: 393), portable devices seem to evade^ the technological determinism inherent in larger devices.S Although there is a trend towards the portable and the personal,X few of us live in houses that do not require some negotiation or rede-

sign to accommodate media engagement. Issues may include noisecontrol, censorship, access, surveillance, notions of place (what homeis for?), use of space (how do we organize the available rooms?).

AT HOME WITH MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

temporal coordination (when are various media devices used?), andchoice of technology (for example, personal music player or stereo).Some of these issues "bleed" into policies promulgated outside thehome (for example, the Australian Government's attempt to policeInternet access).

The variety of media technoiogies now existent in contemporaryAustralian households, and the diversity of styies of Austraiian homes,confounds generalizations about how we soive these tensions. In termsof house typologies, the types of design issues faced by residents of atwo-bedroom apartment may be considerably different to those facedby residents of a "McMansion" (a large house with many bedroomsand living spaces, possibly including a dedicated home entertain-ment room, often iocated on the outer suburban fringe of Australiancities). As Soronen and Sotamaa suggest, the "[i]nteractions and at-mosphere of the contemporary media-rich home are defined throughthe dynamics between private and public, individual and cultural, andpersonal and famiiial" (2004: 211). These dynamics are reflected inthe architecture of the home, and the way we adapt that architecture.According to Lefebvre (2007), even what we perceive as the privatesphere is the result of a history of public and authoritative decisionsabout how space should be structured. Amongst the public policy de-cisions and normative criteria that establish concepts of home (suchas the mid-twentieth-century Australian ideal of the "quarter-acreblock") each individual asserts their own spatial and temporal deci-sions. This creates a complex negotiation of disparate interests whichhas spatial, temporal, and programmatic ramifications.

Use of media technologies is often embedded within domesticroutines. They may be used to coordinate or combine the activitiesof household members (doing the ironing while watching television);they also may define the ways in which we undertake certain activities(going for your morning run while listening to music on your portablemusic piayer). Bausinger (1984: 350) postuiates that many suchbehaviors are ritualized, and the content of the media consumed isnot necessarily of central import. Such coordinations are examplesof design responses by inhabitants to the exigencies of domesticspace and time. They affect the spatial organization of the home (forexample, the ironing board is stored near the television) as well as itstemporal occupation (the ironing is done at a time that coincides witha particular show). It is simplistic to describe such design responses f3asa reflex responsetotechnologymedia technologies and household gorganization evolve together through usage. They are invented behav- giors by individuals. In an effort to avoid the technological determinism "decried by Williams (2003: 5), our current inquiry seeks to rearticulate 2the territory of research away from media-centrism towards a more xsituated study of media devices "so as to better understand the waysin which media processes and everyday life are so closely interwovenwith each other" (Morley 2003: 445).


METHODOLOGYTheoretical, ethnographic, sociological, and phenomenological stud-ies of domestic and urban space, and notions of place such as thoseof Bachelard (1997) and de Certeau (1984) inform the current re-search. To analyze the impact of media technologies on a home, situ-ated, contextual studies can capture the complexity of factors givingrise to a household's design solutions.

Our initial methodological issue was to work out how to turnenvironments that are so familiar and taken for granted into onesthat could be analyzed. Our issue was one previously encounteredby Fiske (1990), who found that "[e]nvironments can be observedand interpreted up to a point from the outside, but can only be expe-rienced from the inside." Fiske's solution was an autoethnography,where he attempted to reconcile the meanings that occurred in theinterdiscourse between the social discourses in the text (his home,or media practice that he was studying) and "those through whichI made sense of my 'self, my social relations, and my social experi-ence" (1990).

Our own study includes not just studying our own behaviors to-wards media devices in our homes, but those of our co-inhabitantsas well. The approach to this analysis was that of "defamiliarization."Bell et al. (2005) observe that defamiliarization, or rendering the fa-miliar strange, is a useful tool for creating space for critical reflectionand thereby opening up new design possibilities. "Estrangement" ordefamiliarization is a formal device used in literature, performanceand visual arts. The device has its origin in Russian formalism in theearly twentieth century (see, for example, Bakhtin 1981). It is alsoa research tactic that can shine a light on human behavior that hasbecome invisible due to familiarity.

Using this tactical device, we started to investigate the interrela-tionships between home, media devices, and human behavior via situ-ated case studies of our own homes. Our aim was to capture potentialcomplexity, diversity, and similarity in the ways by which our house-holds engage with media technology. This provided us with four casestudies. Case study 1 was a household of two heterosexual CaucasianAustralian adults, both with professional occupations. The dwellingin Case study 1 was built in 2006 and is very close to Melbourne'scentral business district. Case study 2 was a household of three het-

J3 erosexual adultstwo parents aged fifty-three and their twenty-three- year-old daughter. The parents are professional Caucasian Australiansri and the daughter is an undergraduate university student. The dwelling^ in case study 2 was a Deco bungalow built in 1929. Case study 3 was2 a household of two heterosexual males comprising a retired profes-X sional father in his early sixties and a twenty-five-year-old son who is

a doctoral candidate. Both are Caucasian Australians. The house wasbuilt in 2001. Case study 4 was a rental household comprising twoheterosexual adults aged thirty-one (female) and thirty-nine (male)


years old. Both are professional Caucasian Australians. The dwellingin case study 4 was built circa 1906.

To achieve the required defamiliarization, we developed self-docu-mentation kits to interrogate our own domestic spaces, and generatecomparable data on each participant's home. The self-documentationpackages contained, or asked participants to provide:

a technology audit sheet to provide quantitative data; instructions for completing a "media diary" or media consump-

tion journal, which sought to tap into and record the daily habits ofeach household member over the period of a week (similar to the"time-use diary" in Silverstone et ai. 1991); |

an indicative house floor plan (showing furniture positions, powerpoints, network access points for computers and televisions) to beused by the research team as "base data" on which to visualizeand map the media diary and the "location" of technologies withinthe home;

a shot list for photographs. I

The self-documentation package also included a collection of materi-als and tasks that were intended to encourage reflection and specu-lation from participants relating to their everyday domestic mediaconsumption and production. The households undertook a seriesof self-paced exercises regarding use, placement, and engagementwith domestic media technology. We were not focusing on the actualcontent of media consumed (for example, television show genre),but rather on the place, time, and circumstances under which mediawas consumed/produced and the negotiation that occurredbothbetween the design of the house and its occupation in relation tomedia consumption as well as the negotiation among the occupantsrequired to facilitate individual and shared media experiences.

The shot list included each room of the house with instructions tostand in the center of the room and take photographs of everything,not merely the media devices. Visual material is increasingly used inethnography. Sarah Pink argues:

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Photography, video and electronic media are becoming increas-ingly incorporated into the work of ethnographers: as culturaltexts; as representations of ethnographic knowledge; and as J2sites of cultural production, social interaction and individual experience that themselves form ethnographic fieldwork ^locales. (Pink 2001:1)

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The series of photographs yielded through the self-documentation xkits would serve a number of purposes: as a potential point ofcomparison, as an orientation device for the media consumptionjournals, as a spatial context, and potentially as a way to clarify or

KATE CHURCH. JENNY WEIGHT, MARSHA BERRY AND HUGH MACDONALD

investigate the specifics of particular spatial and temporal relation-ships. A similar approach is taken by McCarthy (2001: 19-20) in herinvestigation of television In public space where she describes hermethod as partly "chorographic," in that it allows her to capture andexamine unique sites, and partly generic, enabling her to find simi-larities across a variety of sites. In this way, she can explore both site-specific and generic trends.

The material yielded by the self-documentation kits was also ap-proached as a "cultural probe." As Soronen and Sotamaa explain,because the emphasis "is not only on exploring user needs ... probesare supposed to provide opportunities to discover perceptions, atti-tudes and pleasures people attach to daily activities" (2004: 213).A probe is a research device designed to stimulate exploration andis deployed to find out the unknown or unexpected. It generates re-search outcomes by provoking conversation or triggering memory asopposed to gathering precise scientific data. Thus:

... the cultural probes approach can be seen as a part oflarger tendency in the development of human factors researchmethodology that aim at acquiring a more holistic perspectiveon people and their actions. (Soronen and Sotamaa 2004:213)

It is important to recognize the largely qualitative nature of these self-documentation kits and their role in an ethnographically based re-search methodology. The study does not attempt to collect data froma statistically representative sample of the population, but rather Itprovides a qualitative "snapshot" to expose and explore some of thecomplex interactions, issues, and "design solutions" generated by ouruse of domestic media technologies.

An initial phase of our data analysis, and one that featured in anexhibition we curated to disseminate our research, was to map theinvisible flows of space usage, and speculate on the "territories" thatwere being produced as a result. The act of mapping has long been as-sociated with the concept of territory. A simple line on a map can havefar-reaching implications-it determines the country/state/suburb/zone you live in, it constructs "inside" and "outside," and thereforeabstractly constructs difference. Territory is an act of coding space; it

13 attributes identity, significance, and meaning to space. This concept of territory is pertinent to notions of domestic spacey as it typically relates to a perception of ownership or "claim" on space. Ina reductive sense this may manifest in a house through traditionalS place-making strategiesit makes a house (impersonal) into a homeX (personal). This process further territorializes the built form along the

notions of inside/outside.In our pilot case studies we sought to capture the domestic use of

space in different ways. First, the floor plans and sketches for each


case study were analyzed and visualized in relation to the (text-based)media consumption diary through maps. As an investigative device,the act of mapping is one of "making visible" and translating informa-tion. As a research technique, maps allowed us to visualize spatialand temporal data in a manner that enabled us to view multipleevents and information simultaneously. \

Through layering and separating information, maps became auseful tool through which we could begin to unpack the relationshipbetween domestic space, technology, and behavior. As the mappingsindicate, this technique also revealed routine and spatiotemporal ne-gotiations. These are depicted in Figure 1.

The maps document the movement and activities of all of thehousehold occupants (see Figure 2, where these are overlaid). Com-bining hand mapping and digital techniques, a separate map wascreated for each day of the media diary and documents the spaceand sequence of the activities recorded in the media diary for eachoccupant. The mapping techniques also respond to the format inwhich each household completed the media diary. For example, casestudies 1 and 3 completed their media diaries in a "timetable" formatwhereas case study 2's media diary was prose and included a num-ber of anecdotes and speculations as to why certain behaviors wereoccurring. While mapping tends to be understood as a quantitativemedium, we were interested in finding techniques that could combineand translate the qualitative data we had gathered from the mediaconsumption diaries. Therefore two sets of mappings were created foreach household: one that was created using the same cartographicconventions in order to provide a comparable empirical data setacross all of the case studies, and a second set of maps that weretailored to respond to particular idiosyncrasies or pertinent anecdotesdiscovered in individual case studies (see Figure 3).

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Figure 1Mappings of case study 1 on days one and four of the media consumption diary period (note: this house hastwo storeyseach storey has been mapped separately).

KATE CHURCH, JENNY WEIGHT. MARSHA BERRY AND HUGH MACDONALD

Figure 2Overlaid mappings of casestudy 1 (ground and firstfloor) for the entire perioddocumented in the mediaconsumption journal, revealingroutines and behaviors.

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ground floor overlaid firsi fkxir overlaid

A third set of mappings (Figure 4) operated across all four casestudies and provided generalized information about where key tech-noiogies and activities took place in each house. These mappingsenabled a different scale of comparison across the data set.

In combination, the data collected by these research interventionscreate what Silverstone et al. (1991) term a "methodological raft"

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Figure 3Example of a mapping technique responding to an anecdote: "X's study takes priority this week, as it alwaysdoes when she is approaching exams... She listens to i-lectures on the computershe prefers it aloud ratherthan through headphones. This impacts on conversations in the kitchen ... we spend more time in the kitchenand dining room and use other phones" (case study 2).


for the overall study in that it enabled multiple research inputs andmodes of data to be collected and viewed in conjunction with eachother. In combination these provided rich descriptions and revealedmany intricacies of each householdthe combination becoming morethan the sum of its parts. This method enabled a "triangulation" ofinformation whereby each set of data "generated within the researchreflects on the others" (Silverstone et al. 1991: 217).

DISCUSSIONDomestic media include a broad range of technologies that haveeither been designed specifically for use in the home, or have beenco-opted from other contexts. Some devices, such as the television,have become so domesticated that they can seem strangely out ofcontext when they are not located in a home (McCarthy 2001), eventhough the pre-history of television had little to do with providing videoentertainment in the home (Williams 2003: 13). The mid-twentieth-century "consumer durable" phase of domestic appliances includedthe development of much broadcast era technology, and has beendescribed by Williams as the period of "mobile privatisation," which"served an at-once mobile and home-centered way of living" (2003:19). More recent portable devices, such as the mobile phone.

Figure 4Zone mappings locatingusage of the most commontechnologies across all casestudies.

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extended the notion of home (intimacy, family, friends, relaxation) intothe street (Castells et al. 2007; Ling 2004).

In many households, domesticity is partially confirmed by theavailability of a certain range of media technology (the stereo, thetelevision, the radio). Indeed, "home" and media technologies existin a relationship of mutual confirmation. Media technologies becomean intimate aspect of our lives via incorporation into the space/timerhythms of home, at the same time as their existence signifies that wehave come home. Lull's (1990) ethnographic study of how familiesselect television programs revealed social uses of television within thedomestic setting. He proposed that mass media are used by individu-als and family units to "serve their personal needs, create practicalrelationships, and engage the social world" (1990: 29). Engaging inthese activities is, to a certain extent, what being home means.

Despite the unspoken "rules" of domestic space/time, we routinelycontravene them. In all four case studies, the occupants occasionallyused shared space for activities that fall outside of traditional defini-tions of these spaces. For example, all houses utilized the living roomas a work space at various times for non-social activities like wordprocessing. At other times the living room would revert "fluidly" backto a place where social media activities (watching television, listeningto music, etc.) would take place, in the manner of de Certeau's (1984)"practiced places."

Changing Devices, Changing DomesticitiesA nod to history helps contextualize the issues and tensions that resultfrom changing media technologies, changing architecture, and chang-ing expectations of what the home is for. Here are two examples.

In the 1920s, radio was a technical gadget designed for men andboys. You needed quite a bit of tech nica I knowledge to use it, and itwaslistened to privately, via headphones. Itwas also ugly, potentially drip-ping battery acid, and not suitable for the increasingly designed livingrooms of the aspiring middle classes (Spigel 1992:26-8). However, bythe 1930s it had been transformed in the context of modern domestic-ity "into a domestic machine that promised to embellish homes acrossthe nation" (Spigel 1992: 27). Advertising representations of the roleof the radio in the home at the time started to depict the individual"as part of a mass audience more than as part of a family" (Spigel

3 1992: 28) and thus the broadcast transformation of domestic lifeS commenced. Although "home" is conceived in the bourgeois tradition^ as personal and private space (Lefebvre 2007: 314), industrial designu and marketing have always intervened to reconceptualize its natureS and the fantasies that may be entertained there (Spigel 2001). MediaX technologies have been instrumental in the transformation of domes-

tic space, and in representing how those transformations can work.Our second historical example of this nexus between domestic

space, media devices, and human behavior concerns the landline


telephone. Until quite recently the phone was a fixed object andtherefore needed a permanent "nook." This led to the developmentof specific phone furniture which might include a seat and a shelf forphone books and notes (Figure 5). In recent years many such furnish-ings have been abandoned, for even landline phones have becomecordless, and the phone book is being replaced with Internet searchengines.

Even in Its heyday, the architecture of many Australian housesnever provided a good location for the landline phone and its para-phernalia. Homeowners would make do with the hallway, for example.Now the need for a telephone nook is obsolete, and dedicated phonefurniture are junk shop curios.

Of course, the telephone had far-reaching implications for personalrelationships, and those implications continue to evolve. Effectivelycompressing time and space, the landline phone resulted in a majorchange in the perception of personal relations and the disseminationof information. The distinction between personal and public beganto blur via local telephone exchanges, whereby personal informationwas often overheard and passed on by exchange employees (see,for example, Rakow 1992; Sola Pool 1977). The advent of personalportable computing and broadband Internet access have furthercomplicated this privacy issue, necessitating a reconsideration of theboundaries between notions of public and private, both within thehome and without.

Co-opting technologyContemporary media devices may be co-opted by individuals fromone context and made to work in a new one. Crabtree and Rodden(2004) point out that the design of much personal computing andcommunications technology commonly used in contemporary homes

Figure 5Obsolete furniture: "TelephoneTable" by Puf that Down (2006). Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org Aicenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en).

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was originally created for an office/business environment. The work-ing environment of an office with its focus on "production" and "effi-ciency" does not necessarily translate well to a domestic environment.Evidence of these contextual tensions was illustrated by one of ourcase study houses: the printer is on the floor because there is nowhereelse to put it; the fax machine is unplugged in the cupboard becauseit is used so rarely, and media technology is usually accompanied byunsightly power cables that never go with the decor (decor is usuallyconsidered more important at home than in the office). Sometimesour media technologies remain uncomfortably situated in the homethroughout their (and their owners') lives, despite technology compa-nies' attempts at redesigning office technology for domestic contexts,for example the lightweight, small footprint, neutral-colored printer(Figure 6).

From the examples above, it is clear that many homes are not par-ticularly well designed for the rather tactical way we use contemporarymedia devices, and our houses bequeath us eccentric or outdatedassumptions about how media consumption occurs (for example, hav-ing a TV aerial plug in the master bedroom). House occupants mustinvent their own design solutions.

Design problems exist along the twin axes of space and time. Anobvious example of the problem of space occurs in domestic environ-ments where dedicated office or entertainment space is not available.The development of the dual-purpose bedroom/entertainment roomwas a popular design solution to the introduction of the portabletransistor radio in the 1950s, a media technology much favored bythose "who had least social opportunities of other kinds" (Williams2003: 21). Bayley (1990) explores the invention by Sony of the pocketradio, which resulted in a generation of teenagers taking radio up totheir bedrooms to listen to pop music. Such improvisation through co-opting of space has given rise to what Sonia Livingstone (2002) terms"bedroom culture," where televisions, computers, games consoles.

Figure 6"Psyche napping in the sun andon my printer" by Silver Starre. Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en).


and mobile phones effectively transform the ways in which the spaceis negotiated and inhabited.

Two of our case studies had dual-purpose rooms in which computerequipment is positioned within the bedroom (Figure 7). Such roomsmay result in temporal, as well as the obvious spatial, compromises.For example, a dual-purpose room used by two or more members ofthe household may forcibly structure activities in that room in sequen-tial rather than simultaneous ways.

Our case studies also revealed ways in which architecture andmedia devices structured domestic time. In one of our houses, thekitchen is near the television, and watching teievision is difficult ifthere is a lot of noise in the kitchen. The householders must eithernegotiate workarounds and compromises, or put up with a clash ofactivities.

Fixed versus MobileIn the wealthier nations of the early-twenty-first century, space andtime are increasingly at a premium, and fixed media devices are pro-gressively giving way to more mobiie (or portable) ones which shiftand redefine how we negotiate, inhabit, and design space and time.A telling example was found in all our case studies, where laptopcomputers were significantly more prevalent than desktop comput-ers (with an average of two laptops per household and 0.75 desktopcomputers). The revolution of portability may bring with it a revolutionin the very concept of domestic space, as the possibility of havingpersonal media always at hand seems to extend domestic spaceinto the public sphere and vice versa (Castells et al. 2007); it alsoexpands the times when we can engage with types of media. Theseshifts also reify a high level of privacy surrounding the activity ofmedia consumption.

Figure 7Example of dual purposebedroom (case study 4).

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However, older patterns of media consumption are crosshatchedwith these newer ones to form a temporally and spatially layered do-mestic realm. For example, older patterns of television consumption,based on network programming, work concurrently with the temporalshifting made possible by view-on-demand Internet media.

Only one of our households radically breaks the structuring ofspace and time around network television scheduling. This is at leastpartly because they do not own a television; rather they view videovia their networked laptop. This household has effectively "mobilized"television viewing by taking advantage of video-on-demand televisionprogramming available on the Internet, thus taking the time-shiftingpossibilities that were so widely adopted by video recorder users ofthe 1980s and 1990s to a whole new level. The ability of the laptopcomputer to operate as a television transformed the household'sbedroom into a dual-purpose room: it also meant that they watchedtelevision quite late at night, past the hours of the relevant prime-timefree-to-air programming.

Sawhney and Gomez (2000: 1) discuss how domestic media de-vices are integrated in the routine of the household to such an extentthat television programming is often seen as a cue to other activities.Despite their use of portable networked devices, this was consistentwith what we observed in the other three of our case studies. Althoughthese households had more choices about when and what they wouldwatch, patterns of television use were still quite traditionally attachedto evening viewing and network programming schedules.

In partial response to the temporal exigencies of networkedprogramming, one household has since switched to (often illegal)quasi-"video-on-demand" downloading. From a temporal and spatialperspective, the viewing patterns remain remarkably consistent tothose of conventional network televisionvideo is still consumedduring "prime time" on the living room television. Network televisionscheduling seems to have been responsible for a degree of socialconditioning about when it is appropriate to watch video.

The Malleable HomeThe inflexible nature of large, fixed media devices such as the tele-vision set and the stereo are often reinforced by household mediainfrastructure. Cables pull electricity, telephone, Internet, and cabletelevision in from the street.^ Our devices are umbllically attached to

o outlets in the house walls. Lefebvre (2007: 92-3) imagines the houseg represented with all these conduits unraveled:oS our house would emerge as permeated from every direction byX streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable

route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and televisionsignals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then bereplaced by an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of

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in and out conduits. By depicting this convergence of wavesand currents, this new image, much more accurately than anydrawing or photograph, would at the same time disclose the factthat this piece of "immovable property" is actually a two-facetedmachine analogous to an active body: at once a machinecalling for massive energy supplies, and an information-basedmachine with low energy requirements. The occupants of thehouse perceive, receive and manipulate the energies which thehouse itself consumes on a massive scale...

Flows of energywhether human movement, plumbing, electromag-netic or communicationsoccur simultaneously in the various (physi-cal and virtual) spaces, and over a range of temporalities. These flowsare contingent on the routines, predilections, occupations, work de-mands, personalities and ages of the occupants (Figure 8).

The complex negotiation between the external flows of whatLefebvre terms "streams of energy" and the internal placement ofmedia objects also impacts on how domestic space/time is inhabited.The larger media devices require either access to a constant powersupply or some other sort of connection such as a telephone line orcable, and consequently their positioning within the house is dictatedby the location of these points. This design problem was directly ex-perienced by one of our case study participants, who moved houseduring the research period. The location of a television point withina room was repositioned in order to evade the assumptions abouthow the room wouid be used. In this instance, the household's pre-ferred "design for living" could be implemented due to the feasibilityof running a cable from the front of the house into that location. Often,however, such solutions are not available.

As furniture and other functional non-media objects are introducedto a room, a further design tension may arise between the placementof media devices and these other domestic items. With large, fixedmedia technologies, often the media technology determines the loca-tion of other furniture.

Our homes represent a particularly strong instance of space thatwe act upon. In small ways, and occasionally in more significant ways.

Figure 8Movement maps from case study 1 over seven days,


we are constantly reconceptualizing our available home space/time.In the four homes of our case study we found various improvisationsaimed at making a home more inhabitable or comfortable. Onehousehold reported on two recent projects to accommodate mediatechnology: a shelf for a new style of telephone and a door to controlthe noise from the television. Domestic space is malleable along anumber of axesarchitectural, behavioral, temporal, etc. However,there are usually limits and compromises result.

Negotiating HomeNegotiations among occupants may involve the spatial constraintsof the house, the behavioral tendencies/routines of the occupants,and the uses the media technology will be put to. Design solutionswill reflect issues of ownership, access, and availability. These negoti-ated design solutions are often improvised. They may include havingmultiples of commonly used media devices, timetabling access, rulesfor sharing media devices, volume constraints, basic consideration ofneeds, etc.

Our households revealed a variety of methods for negotiating in-dividual and group media engagement. However, the main solutionshared by all households was for private media consumption (remem-bering that each household contained at least two laptops and threeMP3 music players). Devices that were more likely to promote groupengagement are traditional broadcast devices such as television andradio, yet only one person in one household regularly used the radio,and television was more often used Individually in all households. (Theperson who used the radio reported than she must turn it off whenthe other member of the household is in the room, thus effectivelyreducing it to a personal device.)

The findings from our technology audit Indicated that fixed devicesare perceived as shared (even if they are often used individually). Theexception is the household with four televisions (case study 3). In thishousehold a link exists between where the television is located, whouses it, and when it is watched. Shared viewing occurs in the loungeroom, which is the only room organized to support this kind of usagedue to the position of the television set and the configuration of loungechairs, whereas Individual television viewing occurs in the bedrooms.Neither of the occupants needs to negotiate which program they

13 watch, because simultaneous viewing is always possible (Figure 9). In this household, power relations operate to determine how the lounge room television is used. The ideal mode of consuming televi-^ sion is sitting comfortably on a couch in the lounge room. If a conflictS over program choice occurs, the privileged member of the householdX (the father) watches in the lounge room, while the son watches rather

less comfortably in his dual-purpose bedroom.Dual-purpose bedrooms have emerged as a design solution in

intergenerational houses to conflicts over temporal and special use


Figure 9Simultaneous television accessin case study 3.

of media, and thus are microcosms for the shifting approaches todomestic media engagement. In case study 3, the contrast betweenthe two bedrooms belonging to different generations was revealing.Both were equipped with connections for television, telephone, andoutlets for computers and other media devices. Although only anaverage-sized room with a large double bed, the son's bedroom wascrammed with a host of media devices, including a television housedin a wardrobe on a wheel-out trolley for space-saving reasons, and aminimalist desk for a laptop computer. In the father's bedroom, theonly media device was a cordless telephone, as he had privileged ac-cess to the lounge room. A similar pattern was identified in case study2 with a bedroom culture (Figure 10).

Livingstone (2002: 121) argues that there has been a shift inmedia use from an era best characterized as "family television" toone of individualized media lifestyles and, particularly for childrenand young people, of bedroom culture. This shift has been facilitatedby the multiplication of domestic media goods through price reduc-tions, a growth in portable media, innovation in existing technologies,and by the diversification of media forms which encourages themultiplication of technologies through upgrading and recycling itemsthrough the householdchildren no longer just get hand-me-downclothes, they also get hand-me-down technology. Media technologiesare increasingly reconfiguring both the physical and social space ofbedrooms, which in turn affects the hierarchy and occupation of theoverall house.

Figure 10Accommodating mediainfrastructure with domesticspatial configurations.

CO


Domestic TransformationsAs we have shown above, domestic media technologies are transfor-mative of home, but are also transformed by us because of the home.On the one hand, householders reconfigure their houses structurally,aesthetically, and perhaps even definitionally (case study 1 has cre-ated a music/gym room out of what is marked on the house plan asa formal lounge). On the other hand, human interaction may be medi-ated, if not governed, by the situation or the portability of particulardevices. In case study 2, this was exemplified by an Ethernet cablethat dictated where laptop computers could be used. This not only de-termined the placement of appropriate furniture, but converted thatroom to a non-social (work) space, and restructured the tasks thatmight occur around this computer to give priority to Internet use. Aset of priorities around purposes for Internet use may be inferred. Thejournal notes for case study 2 revealed that listening to an iLecturetook precedence over checking private e-maii accounts. This was aform of making do or improvisation in the absence of wireless con-nectivity to the Internet.

The other houses all had wireless access and Internet use perme-ated the whole space. Checking of e-maii and other Internet-basedactivities occurred in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and diningroom. Because of the spatial freedom achieved by wireless Internetaccess, the householders were able to transform the meaning of thedevice, for example by using the computer as a recipe book in thekitchen. Meanwhile, access to the network revolutionized precon-ceived notions of the spatial and temporal uses of the kitchen.

Public and PrivateThe reconsideration of the distinction between public and private, andthe "shared privacy" of the domestic lounge room has occurred in arange of discourses. Crabtree and Rodden divide the home into "eco-logical habitats" (places where communication media live and whereresidents go in order to locate particular resources); "activity centers"(places where media is actively produced and consumed and whereinformation is transformed); and "coordinate displays" (places wheremedia are displayed and made available to residents to coordinatetheir activities) (2004: 205). However, this typology underestimatesthe portable and flexible nature of contemporary media technologies.

13 A simiiar critique may be applicable to the anaiysis of Beil e( al. regarding the domestic environment in terms of space, community, time, iabor, and piay (2005:157-9). Our self-documentation kits suggestedO that the zones in our houses are much more fluidly used. When space2 is so fluid, new boundaries need erecting, and new systems of eti-X quette are required.

Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) distinction between "smooth"and "striated" space has useful applications to our understandingof domestic space(s) in the context of emergent uses of networked


and portable media technologies. Digital information contains manyof the qualities of "smooth space": continuous variation, open to thevirtual and to the locally governed forces of self-organizationsmoothis indeterminate space. Striated space is sedentary, filled by formsand perceived things; it produces order and a succession of distinctforms, such as a television program time determining a domestic rou-tine.Differing temporalities, such as sequentiality (linear time, "clocktime") versus simultaneity, rhythmic or indefinite time; objectivemeasured time versus subjective experience of time; and local versusglobal (non-diurnal) time may be some of the temporal concomitantsof smooth and striated space.^

A range of domestic activities occur either in the smooth space/simultaneous time of digital Information flow or the striated space/sequential time of the physical house. Spatial compression andtemporal disembeddedness are primary experiences resulting fromnetworks of digital information; at the same time, older broadcastera media technologies tie us to striated space, with their programschedules, local news, and sports programming. Globalization, whichis in large parta communications revolution (Giddens 2003; Jameson1998), has penetrated the walls of our houses via the networkbutat the same time, we still have bodies, local relationships, and thesix o'clock news. Within the privacy of our homes the contradictionsand compromises wrought by a clash of communications and mediacultures are yet to be resolved.

Deleuze and Guattari offers a useful framework for thinking aboutthe concept of "territory" as an operative process as opposed to aspecific or fixed spatial outcome. This provides a lens through whichto understand the territorializing capacities of digital information flowand the reterritorialization of domestic space through engagementwith technology.

Technology used in homes constructs territories in a multitude ofways and increasingly these modes of territorialization reach beyondnotions of physical expansion to the realm of the digitalvirtual terri-tories. A households' claim to virtual territory Is facilitated by improvedconnection speeds; the result of this colonization is an intensificationof communications exchange, external to the family unit. The distribu-tive nature of digital information and their associated networks formhighly strategic territories that are neither democratic nor location-de-pendent, but rather link some disparate locations and exclude others. [2

The virtual territorialization of home is structured by the possibilities of Hertzian space (Varnelis 2008), which permit or deny engagements gwith various types of networked Information. Cities contain clouds of ^electromagnetic signals emanating from a variety of transmission Etowers which connect PDAs, mobile phones, and laptop computers acwith large- and small-scale networks. Hertzian space engages on twolevels in the territorialization of space in domestic environments: ourdomestic media technologies bring it into our houses and convert it

KATE CHURCH. JENNY WEIGHT, MARSHA BERRY AND HUGH MACDONALD

Figure 11Inside/outside connections withHertzian space.

DO

into information and communications; in turn it shapes how domesticspace/time is occupied by people.

Therefore digital networking converts households into a hub for atwo-way information/media/communications exchange (Figure 11)networked householders are not only consumers of information, butalso producers and disseminators to a potentially internationalizedpublic. All this is done instantaneously "from the safety of your ownhome," possibly quasi-anonymously. However, the digital porosity ofdomestic walls is perceived as both a threat (for example, to children)and a boon.

Connectivity and mobile devices not only challenge traditional no-tions of how we design domestic space/time to enable our use ofmedia technologies, but what we understand home to be. We arecontending with a transition from communications centralization todispersal, and from collective to individualized media. This transi-tion blurs and interrupts the convenient (albeit reductive) binaries bywhich we tend to conceptualize space: public and private, domesticand commercial, etc.

Having personal, networked, portable devices means that eachhouseholder engages with his/her own choice of media on a scheduleto suit themselves, with little awareness of each other. A "leveling" ofdomestic space and time occursno longer do specific experiencesbelong to a specific space/time (for example, the conjunction of televi-sion, lounge room, and early nighttime). According to Mitchell:

The more we interrelate events and processes across space,the more simultaneity dominates succession; time no longerpresents itself as one damn thing after another, but as a struc-ture of multiple, parallel, sometimes cross-connected and inter-woven, spatially distributed processes that cascade around theworld through networks. (Mitchell 2003:14)


For much of the twentieth-century broadcast era, home was an envi-ronment of sequential and group activity. As a result of the current in-terest in personal, hyper-portable devices, the lounge room becomesobsolete; at best it is a nostalgic and perhaps elitist space. Instead ofthe home entertainment center, forward-thinking architects may beginto design radically multipurpose rooms, one for each householder, ca-tering for all personal activities, from sleeping to grooming to mediaengagement. Perhaps only cooking, eating, and sex will require coor-dination (via wireless-enabled text message).

Twentieth-century suburban space established a "threshold ofsociabilitythe point beyond which survival would be impossible be-cause all social life would have disappeared" (Lefebvre 2007: 316).Suburban space Includes private space, "where people could spreadout in comfort and enjoy those essential luxuries, time and space,to the full" (Lefebvre 2007: 316). However, the luxuries of time andspace have evolved since Lefebvre was writing, as we incorporatemore media technologies into domestic life. Householders are rein-venting Lefebvre's notion of suburban space as they enter the "globalsuburbia of personalized networks. Domestic space/time is nowreplete with material connections and devices that literally bring theoutside in. Home has become paradoxical; we go home to experiencebeing away:

... these "smart skinned" homes of tomorrow develop fanta-sies about media, mobility, and domesticity... Just as adver-tisers promised consumers that portable TV would allow themto imaginatively liberate themselves from domestic doldrumswhile remaining in the safe space of the home, the new "smartskinned" homes of the digital age negotiate a dual impulsefor domesticity on the one hand and the escape from it on theother. (Spigel 2001: 400)

As domestic space and time evolves with our devices, so will oursense of polite behavior. Intergenerational tensions surrounding bed-room culture and family time, often the subject of media speculation,suggest that we are only beginning to renegotiate the etiquette ofbeing home. i

CONCLUSION ^In this article we have charted our initial research into the relation- pships between domestic technology, space, and time. We have fo- gcused on the uses of domestic media technologies, defined broadly, ^and considered how houses are adaptedor notto their use. This Sadaptation may have occurred spatially (e.g. the reconfiguration of a xroom, retro-fitting, etc.), temporally (whereby our domestic habits androutines may alter), and programmatically (e.g. the dining room table

KATE CHURCH, JENNY WEIGHT. MARSHA BERRY AND HUGH MACDONALD

may get reprogrammed as an office desk when work commitmentsencroach on the evening's domestic activities).

How we accommodate media technologies in domestic space/time involves a range of decisions, choices, negotiations, and compro-mises. We choose not only what media information to consume, butwe increasingly have choices about what device we use to access andconsume that media with. We are choosing the "when," "where," and(to some extent) "how" of media consumption. However, these choicesare predicated on a range of specific spatial, temporal, material, andsocial contexts, which produce both possibilities and constraints.Thus the relationship between domestic space and the consumptionof media is complex, negotiated, and usually compromised.

Despite the undoubted compromises that we make, the radicalincorporation of media technology into our homes may be changingthe nature of the suburban homeno longer does home establish a"threshold of sociability" in Lefebvre's sense, it changes the terms andconditions of that sociability in favor of a heavily mediated sociability,in which direct exchange is filtered and routed, even, perhaps, amongfamily members. Our aim has been to document this transition ratherthan to pronounce judgment upon it, except, perhaps to reconfirmthat peopleand familiesare adaptive entities.

Despite their apparent solidity, houses are fluid and changingspaces, and the notion of "home" is being redesigned, often in an ad-hoc manner, to respond to the spatiotemporal novelties thrown up bycontemporary portable, personal, and networked media technologies.

Bausinger (1984: 349) proposes that we should consider ourmedia engagement as "a structured set [of psychological motiva-tions] within a very complex household of needs." This article hasattempted to unpack one aspect of these complex needs. To achievea more holistic sense of the role of media in everyday life, a furtherphase of this research would include a consideration of the emotionalimpact of mediated experience on everyday human exchanges; thephenomenology of media technology (for example the differencebetween "watching television"a flow experience in Williams' sense(2003: 89); and "using the Internet" which in most instances "runsout" unless you interact (the page stays the same; the video simplyends); changing concepts of family (Williams 2003: 20-1) and iden-tity (Giddens 1991). By synthesizing a richer interplay of factors wewould further unpack the ways that home, technology, and humanbehavior evolve together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe authors acknowledge the support of the Design Research Instit-Ute, Urban Liveability Program, RMIT University.


NOTES1. These structurally reconfigure the exterior of the house, consid-

ering there was a need to place receiver boxes for these cables inconvenient spots.

2. Space constraints prevent a proper consideration of types of timethat media technologies suggest here. A good introduction to typesof time can be found in Crossan ei al. (2005).

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