Smart Home Masculinities

Abstract

Existing research has shown dominant smart home imaginaries to be gendered visions of technologically deterministic lives of affluent young white men and middle-class hetero-normative white cultures. Instead, we argue, a more realistic, plausible and ethical approach to smart home design needs to originate from the different starting point of gender diversity and equality in the home. To demonstrate this, we situate smart home design within the dominant masculine and colonising narratives of industry and science. We then develop a design anthropological analysis of the everyday experiences as reported by four middle-class white Australian men living in heteronormative family households. We propose that existing masculinist imaginaries of smart home futures are not only limited because they fail to account for the diverse experiences and aspirations of heterogeneous households but because they also fail to recognise the messiness, contingency and processual nature of the social, material and experiential circumstances of the very heteronormative households they appear to be aligned with. A feminist approach to the smart home would need to be designed from and with gender-equal relations in the very site of the home.

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