Diversifying the Domestic: A Design Inquiry into Collective and Mobile Living

We report on a design research inquiry aimed at understanding and exploring the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace and choose to live within collective houses and mobile vehicles as their homes. A goal of our work is to inquire into how such lived alternatives of 'home' can take a step toward broadening possibilities for conceptualizing 'domestic' technology and provoking questions around how it might be critiqued, imagined, and designed. We offer a brief overview of our ongoing research with a sample of collective and mobile dwellers, and propose three themes that extend prior generative work in this area: critique through living, taking time to adapt, and the transitional home. We use these themes in a design-led approach to propose six fictional future technology concepts that aim 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. We conclude with a reflection on our work, its limitations, and opportunities it suggests for future research and practice.