Making Strange

Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies GENEVIEVE BELL Intel Research MARK BLYTHE University of York and PHOEBE SENGERS Cornell University This article argues that because the home is so familiar, it is necessary to make it strange, or defa- miliarize it, in order to open its design space. Critical approaches to technology design are of both pra cticaland soc ialimpor tance in thehome . Home app lia nce s are lo ade d wit h cul tur al ass oci ati ons such as the gendered division of domestic labor that are easy to overlook. Further, homes are not the same everywhere—even within a country . Peoples’ aspirations and desires differ greatly across and between cultures. The target of western domestic technology design is often not the user, but the consumer. Web refrigerators that create shopping lists, garbage cans that let advertisers know what is thrown away, cabinets that monitor their contents and order more when supplies are low are central to current images of the wireless, digital home of the future. Drawing from our research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia, we provide three different narratives of defamiliarization. A historical reading of American kitchens provides a lens with which to scrutinize new technologies of domesticity, an ethnographic account of an extended social unit in England problematizes taken-for-granted domestic technologies, and a comparative ethnography of the role of information and communication technologies in the daily lives of urban Asia’s middle classes reveals the ways in which new technologies can be captured and domesticated in unexpected ways. In the final section of the arti cle, we build on these mo ments of defami liar ization to sugge st a broad set of challenges and strategies for design in the home. Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues; J.7 [Com- puter Applications]: Computers in Other Systems—Consumer products; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Prese ntation]: User Interfaces—Theory and methods, User-centered design; K.m [Computing Milieux]: Miscellaneous General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Theory Add ition al Key Wo rds and Phrase s: Human -computerinteraction, defa mili ariza tion , dome stictech- nology, gender, ethnicity, anthropology, ethnography, domestic labor, home entertainment This research was supported by the NSF under grant IIS-0238132. Authors’ addresses: G. Bell, Intel Corp., 2111 NE 25th Ave., MS JF3-377, Hillsboro, OR 97124; email: [email protected]; M. Blythe, Deptartment of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK; P. Sengers, Cornell Information Science, 301 College Ave., Ithaca, NY 14850. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212) 869-0481, or [email protected]. C 2005 ACM 1073-0616/05/0600-0149 $5.00 ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2005, Pages 149–173.

Making Strange

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