Domestic routines and design for the home

The domestic environment is predicted by market analysts to be the major growth area in computing over the next decade, yet it is a poorly understood domain at the current time of writing. Research is largely confined to the laboratory environment, although it has been recognized that technological developments will in due course have to resonate with the 'stable and compelling routines of the home'. This paper seeks to inform the development of computing for the home environment by unpacking the notion of domestic routines as coordinational features of domestic life. We focus in particular on the routine nature of communication and use ethnographic study to explicate a discrete organization of coordination whereby household members routinely manage communications coming into and going out of the home. The coordinate ways in which members routinely organize communication are made visible through sequences of practical action, which articulate domestic routines and key properties of communication. These include ecological habitats, activity centres, and coordinate displays where technology is at the core. These organizational features combine to form a locally produced system of communication and open up the play of possibilities for design, articulating the distinct needs of particular settings and 'prime sites' for the deployment of new computing devices and applications in the home. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.