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Pottering by design

Published: 20 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The last decade of work in HCI has seen an increasing emphasis on the role of technology in the home, and a corresponding need for novel approaches for studying the needs, activities and relationships that constitute home life, so as to inform technology design. In this vein, we report on a particular aspect of home life in Britain: pottering. We investigate the ways in which pottering---unplanned and serendipitous tidying, cleaning, gardening and minor home improvement---can be used as a lens to understand the non-task-focused roles that technology may play in the home. We also describe the strategies we used to study this curious class of activities and hopefully illustrate how open, and sometimes opportunistic, approaches to research can have value.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '08: Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges
October 2008
621 pages
ISBN:9781595937049
DOI:10.1145/1463160
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. critical design
  2. design
  3. domestic IT
  4. home life
  5. pottering

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  • (2023)Designing for Digital Environmental Stewardship in Waste ManagementProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596127(1581-1594)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
  • (2023)The IoT Codex: A Book of Programmable Stickers for Authoring and Composing Embedded Computing Applications2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00009(1-11)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
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  • (2021)Proceed with Care: Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care PerspectiveProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445602(1-15)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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  • (2019)Diversifying the DomesticProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3323687(1377-1390)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
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