The home as a setting, not a laboratory with fewer controls

A deployment into a household is usually described as a loss. The laboratory had controls; the home has children, a washing machine and a doorbell, so a home study looks like a laboratory study with the controls removed. That description is wrong, and it produces bad studies. This eighth of ten units follows the seventh, which priced a laboratory that keeps a setting, and describes a setting that has no laboratory in it at all. The home is a setting organised by routines, by relations between the people who live there, and by values that decide what is acceptable inside it. Those are not noise around a signal. They are what the deployment is positioned to see, and they decide what the study may count, when it ends, and who may speak for the result.

The consequences are practical, and they fall hardest on the household that cannot afford to keep the system running.

A setting with its own order

Venkatesh (1996) argued the point before there was much domestic computing to study: the household, not the individual user, is the social unit that shapes take-up.

Crabtree and Rodden (2004) describe what that order consists of. Their ethnographic study treats domestic routine as a coordinative feature of domestic life. It shows households routinely managing communications into and out of the home, through arrangements the authors call ecological habitats, activity centres and coordinate displays. The order is locally produced, so no design can assume it. Tolmie and colleagues (2002) reach the same conclusion: a resource becomes unremarkable through its embedding in routine, not through its perceptual qualities.

A design defers to the household or intervenes, and nothing yet settles which

Taylor and Swan (2005) studied family life ethnographically and described the organising systems families build from calendars, notes and lists. These systems shape relations between household members, not only schedules, and the coordination work fell mainly to mothers. Their recommendation is that technology supply resources for people to construct their own arrangements, not institute a system over them.

Neustaedter, Brush and Greenberg (2009) supply the scale. The study covered 44 middle-class families in Canada and the United States, 60 individuals in all. Almost every household had a primary scheduler, the mother in 41 of the 44 (93 per cent). Families divided by how far others took part. Monocentric families, 39 per cent, had almost no involvement from anyone else. Pericentric families, 27 per cent, had occasional involvement. The rest were polycentric.

Consolvo and colleagues (2008) take the other position in the same setting. Their UbiFit Garden deployment ran a three-week field trial with twelve participants, six women and six men aged 25 to 35. They used the study phone as their own and saw a glanceable display of their activity. Success is judged by what people do over the weeks, not by how faithfully the system fits the arrangement they already had.

The household, not the person, is the unit of account

Grinter and colleagues (2009) tracked three households in the United Kingdom over eight months and nineteen households in San Francisco and Atlanta. They distinguish the technical work of setting up and maintaining the network from the collaborative social work of the household that embeds it. The two are intertwined, and a study that logs one person's device sees neither.

Richards and Veinot (2025) reconceptualise family-based chronic disease management through routines theory. They start from the observation that HCI had no systematic basis for designing for these family-based activities. Their framework treats the collective routine as what technology should support, not the patient. Grinter and Palen (2002) interviewed sixteen teenage instant-messaging users. They found the difference between school and college use accounted for by the teenagers' autonomy, which is itself a function of domestic obligations. Gupta, Karnatak and Jain (2024) followed home phlebotomists and their patients in India. They found their workflows organised to build support networks that helped them optimise their day.

Judge, Neustaedter and Kurtz built the Family Window, an always-on video link between two homes. They deployed it in two families for eight months, and in four more for five weeks (Judge et al., 2010). Households reported feeling more connected through availability awareness, but the value was reported by people who could see and hear the link, and it depended on how close the relationship already was and on control over autonomy. The pair of homes, not the account holder, is the unit of account. What the case does not show is an outcome: connectedness is self-reported, not measured against anything the link was built to change.

The moral economy of a home

A household also has values that decide what may be done inside it, and those can rule out a design. Woodruff, Augustin and Foucault (2007) interviewed 29 people across twenty Orthodox Jewish households. They asked about automating their homes for the Sabbath, when religious law forbids turning electrical devices on or off. The homes divided by technology, nine on timers, six on X10 and five on a scheduling system. Acceptability was settled by observance rather than usability, since triggering a motion sensor would mean affecting the world directly with the body.

The same tension appears without religion. Mynatt and colleagues (2001) designed a digital family portrait, a picture frame whose icons summarise 28 days of a relative's activity. It was tested in a nine-day field trial with a grandmother and two grandchildren, using hand-simulated sensor data. Its aim was support that respected the portrayed person's privacy, and it placed surveillance inside the design. Koh and colleagues (2025) measure that judgement moving. Their four-week study of twenty single-person households, thirteen men and seven women with a mean age of 24.79, recorded privacy acceptability before and after collection.

What a home deployment has to build for itself

O'Brien and colleagues (1999) found the technology in a set-top-box trial taken up in ways the trial design had not anticipated. Four method consequences follow. Recruitment has to reach households where they are, and the person who signs is not always the person counted. The outcome has to be defined at the level the arrangement is organised around, which here means the household. Support has to be planned, because the upkeep falls on residents and fails often (Grinter et al., 2009). And the end has to be designed, because a household reorganised around a system cannot easily be returned to its earlier state.

Contested question: fit or intervene, and whose unit?

The first disagreement is whether a deployment should defer to the household's existing order or change it. Three studies hold the deferring position. Taylor and Swan (2005) recommend that technology supply resources rather than institute a system. Crabtree and Rodden (2004) treat routine as the coordinative structure a design must work within. Woodruff, Augustin and Foucault (2007) show that a household's values can settle the question before any design question is asked. The intervening position is held by Consolvo and colleagues (2008), whose deployment exists to change activity behaviour. Neither is tested against the other: the two studies differ in setting and purpose as well as stance.

The second disagreement is whose result it is. Consolvo and colleagues (2008) reported twelve individuals with personal phones and displays. Neustaedter and colleagues (2009) analyse 44 families. Grinter and colleagues (2009) find the network's upkeep distributed across households. Richards and Veinot (2025) argue that the management activities are collective. A study that counts individuals will not see the coordination work a household-level account makes visible.

The deferring position rests on ethnographic studies of routine (Crabtree and Rodden, 2004; Taylor and Swan, 2005), the intervening position on a three-week field trial with twelve participants (Consolvo et al., 2008). The second dispute rests on an interview study of 44 families and a field study of home networks (Neustaedter et al., 2009; Grinter et al., 2009). What would settle the first is a comparison that holds the technology constant, varies only how far the design defers to the routine, and measures the outcome at that level (Neustaedter et al., 2009). While the dispute is open, design for the household and state which level the result is counted at. The strongest objection is that a household count can average away the person, usually the mother, who carries the arrangement.

Where the area is heading

The direction is to treat the household as the design unit and the routine as the object of intervention. Richards and Veinot (2025) use routines theory to give family-based chronic disease management a systematic basis for design. Gupta and colleagues (2024) find the digital workflow in the home sustained by human support networks that the technology does not provide. Koh and colleagues (2025) measure privacy acceptability before and after four weeks of sensing, treating the moral economy as something that moves during a study. None of them yet supplies evidence that designing around the household's routine improves a measurable outcome.

The sources this unit rests on

Each note states what the cited document did and found. Titles are in British spelling, and identifiers were checked against registered metadata on 2 November 2026.

• Venkatesh, A. (1996). Computers and other interactive technologies for the home. doi:10.1145/240483.240491 An analysis of computer adoption and use in the home arguing that the field lacked a theoretical and empirical base. It establishes the household, not the user, as the social unit that shapes adoption.
• O'Brien, J., Rodden, T., Rouncefield, M. and Hughes, J. (1999). At home with the technology: an ethnographic study of a set-top-box trial. doi:10.1145/329693.329698 An ethnographic study of how households took up a set-top-box trial, finding use shaped by household arrangements rather than by the trial design. It is the earliest case here of findings that came from the setting.
• Mynatt, E. D., Rowan, J., Craighill, S. and Jacobs, A. (2001). Digital family portraits. doi:10.1145/365024.365126 Designs a picture frame whose icons summarise 28 days of a relative's activity, tested in a nine-day field trial with a grandmother and two grandchildren using hand-simulated sensor data. Its aim, support that respects the portrayed person's privacy, puts surveillance inside the design.
• Grinter, R. E. and Palen, L. (2002). Instant messaging in teen life. doi:10.1145/587078.587082 A qualitative study of sixteen teenage instant-messaging users and their place in the domestic ecology. It found the difference between school and college use accounted for by the teenagers' autonomy, itself a function of domestic and scholastic obligations.
• Tolmie, P., Pycock, J., Diggins, T., MacLean, A. and Karsenty, A. (2002). Unremarkable computing. doi:10.1145/503376.503448 Draws on field studies of domestic life to ask what makes technology invisible in use, and finds a resource becomes unremarkable through embedding in routine rather than through its design. It underwrites the claim that a deployment works inside an arrangement that already exists.
• Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2004). Domestic routines and design for the home. doi:10.1023/b:cosu.0000045712.26840.a4 An ethnographic study treating domestic routine as a coordinative feature of domestic life, showing households managing communication through ecological habitats, activity centres and coordinate displays. The order is locally produced, so no design can assume it.
• Taylor, A. S. and Swan, L. (2005). Artful systems in the home. doi:10.1145/1054972.1055060 An ethnographic study showing that organising systems built from calendars, notes and lists shape relations between household members, with coordination work falling mainly to mothers. It recommends that technology supply resources for people to build their own arrangements.
• Woodruff, A., Augustin, S. and Foucault, B. (2007). Sabbath day home automation: it's like mixing technology and religion. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240710 Interviews 29 people in twenty Orthodox Jewish households about automating homes for the Sabbath, dividing them into nine timer, six X10 and five scheduling-system homes. Acceptability was settled by religious observance rather than usability, and surrender of control is proposed as a design resource.
• Consolvo, S. et al. (2008). Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of UbiFit Garden. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357335 A three-week field trial with twelve participants, six women and six men aged 25 to 35, who used a study phone and a glanceable display of their activity for 21 to 25 days. It is the clearest case here of a deployment designed to intervene in routine.
• Grinter, R. E. et al. (2009). The ins and outs of home networking. doi:10.1145/1534903.1534905 Studies home networks through three United Kingdom households tracked over eight months and nineteen households in San Francisco and Atlanta. It separates the technical work of running a network from the collaborative social work of the household, and finds neither well supported.
• Neustaedter, C., Brush, A. J. B. and Greenberg, S. (2009). The calendar is crucial. doi:10.1145/1502800.1502806 Studies the calendaring routines of 44 middle-class families in Canada and the United States, 60 individuals. In 41 of the 44 families the mother was the primary scheduler, and families divided into monocentric (39 per cent), pericentric (27 per cent) and polycentric types.
• Richards, O. K. and Veinot, T. C. (2025). Reconceptualising technology for chronic disease management activities in the family. doi:10.1145/3719347 A two-year study of 38 families managing type 2 diabetes or HIV/AIDS, using routines theory to investigate chronic disease management activities in families, on the ground that the domain had no systematic basis for design. It found 14 activities within five interrelated cycles, and argues for supporting the collective routine rather than the patient alone.
• Gupta, M., Karnatak, N. and Jain, M. (2024). Understanding the technology-mediated home phlebotomy ecosystem in India. doi:10.1145/3637421 Interviews and shadowing of home phlebotomists, riders and patients show workflows organised to build support networks of human infrastructure that help them optimise their day. It shows a deployment reordering work in the home rather than merely recording it.
• Koh, Y., Lee, C., Joung, E., Lee, H. and Lee, U. (2025). Harnessing home IoT for self-tracking emotional wellbeing. doi:10.1145/3749485 A four-week study of twenty single-person households, thirteen men and seven women with a mean age of 24.79, combining mobile, wearable and home IoT data with repeated wellbeing self-reports. Privacy acceptability recorded before and after collection showed the judgement forming during the study.
• Judge, T. K., Neustaedter, C. and Kurtz, A. F. (2010). The family window: the design and evaluation of a domestic media space. doi:10.1145/1753326.1753682 Deployed an always-on video link, the Family Window, in two homes for eight months and four more for five weeks. Always-on video raised self-reported connectedness through availability awareness and shared everyday life, but its value depended on close relationships and control over autonomy.