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.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart homes
• future imaginaries
• everyday masculinities
• digital housekeeping
• Australia
• feminist design anthropology

Introduction

Everyday life in the home has long since been regarded as a key site through which gender relations and identities are constituted and lived, and it has demonstrated that domestic tasks can be performed and narrated in ways that are distinctively masculine (Pink 2004). This is no less the case as smart home systems and devices become increasingly ubiquitous. However, our research suggests, and we demonstrate below, once everyday masculine narratives of home become combined with the masculine and colonising narratives of smart technologies, a new issue emerges. On the one hand, by aligning with a masculine rendering of the home, smart technologies are not always inclusive (Berg 1994; Strengers and Nicholls 2018). Yet, the particular masculinities they represent do not always align with how masculinity is performed at home, as demonstrated by ethnographic studies that have complicated narratives of smart home masculinities (Kennedy et al. 2015; Sinanan and Horst 2021).

In this article, we argue for a shift in paradigm for smart home conceptualisation and design. This involves moving away from the masculine gendered dominant imaginaries which align the smart home with the technologically determined lives of affluent young white men and middle-class hetero-normative white cultures critiqued by feminist science and technology studies (STS) scholars (e.g. Spigel 2005). Instead, we call for a more realistic, plausible and ethical approach to smart home design, which would originate from the different starting point of gender diversity and equality in the home. This means overturning the gendered and colonising narratives which drive and fund science, industry and policy, towards the ethics of a feminist approach that values collaboration, diversity and equality and engages in the sites of the everyday to constitute these inclusively. To begin to shift smart home design towards an approach that attends to real experiences of everyday life, our strategy, as played out in this article, involves demonstrating what happens in the everyday and why this complicates the dominant narratives about smart homes that industry and government tend to subscribe to. We do this through a design anthropological analysis of the detail of the everyday experiences reported by three middle-class men living in heteronormative family households in Australia, which is a common and successful presentation method in anthropological studies of home (e.g. Miller 2001; Pink 2004). We have specifically selected these examples for our discussion because we wish to make the point that even those men whose domestic arrangements and sexualities conform with heteronormative masculinity are unlikely to live out the masculinities that many existing analyses have shown to correspond with the smart home visions represented in dominant narratives. The examples are intended to demonstrate the consistently occurring principles through which this occurred across our sample (rather than to stand for specific actions, technologies and materialities consistently repeated across our sample): how men improvise through contingency in taking responsibility for digital housekeeping; how men ‘prove’ the value of technologies to women; how masculine ways of knowing emerge through digital housekeeping; and how men maintain levels of control over smart home systems. These principles are subsequently discussed in the penultimate section of this article.

A design anthropological analysis is suited to this task precisely because it brings close attention to the everyday, understanding the home as an ongoingly emergent site, and attending to the sensory and affective modes through which gender, home and technology are experienced and enacted (Smith and Otto 2016; Pink et al. 2017; Pink et al. 2022). Conceptually it invites us to consider how people improvise with new technologies in the contingent circumstances of their everyday lives, to maintain a sense of familiarity, routine and order (Pink et al. 2017). Therefore, it makes a particular contribution that takes existing everyday modes of approaching everyday uncertainties and possibilities as its starting point. A feminist design anthropology of emerging technologies and home contributes a focus on the gendered dimensions of how these relations play out and raises the question of how by shifting the gender balance within these relations we might advocate for better, more ethical, realistic and plausible smart home design. This builds on feminist critiques of smart home narratives by STS and media scholars (e.g. Spigel 2005; Strengers and Kennedy 2020), and advances them through an ethnographic focus on men’s situated engagements with smart home technologies.

Design anthropology itself seeks to change anthropological practice, towards an ethical and interventional ethnography, and as argued elsewhere (Pink et al. 2022) this means seeking radical change in both how academic disciplines work and in societal approaches to design and where design happens. As feminist anthropologist Mahmud (2021, 354) argues, anthropology itself ‘needs rewriting’, towards an ‘antiracist, anticapitalist, antifascist, decolonial and abolitionist feminist project that we would want to be part of’ (2021, 354). Bringing this together with design anthropology’s focus on signalling ways forward towards interventional approaches for bringing about possible futures of this kind, offers us not simply a way to study the gendered narratives and relations of smart homes, but to consider where and with whom a feminist design anthropology suggests they might be ethically and inclusively designed.

Differently to conventional scholarship it does not simply ask a research question and seek to respond to it but rather aspires to identify misalignments that lead to modes of exclusion and to unrealistic future visions, and to propose interventions that could lead to more inclusive and plausible futures. The research discussed here takes a novel step. Much existing research – including our own – has focused on those groups of people who are more obviously excluded in dominant narratives about smart home futures (e.g.). Instead, while acknowledging such exclusion, this article surfaces the realities of those who superficially appear to be included in dominant narratives - heteronormative men. However, it finds that these men’s experiences of and engagements with smart home technologies vary from the dominant narratives when they are investigated further. By better understanding these nuances of gendered engagements with smart home technologies, we argue, we gain a much more powerful vision of how dominant narratives are misaligned with everyday realities. That, while on one level they can be critiqued because they represent gendered narratives and hegemonic heterosexual techno masculinities, on another the masculinities they represent, are hard to find in everyday life. Thus we argue that a feminist approach needs to advocate for inclusive design not simply as a counter narrative to the images of masculinity that are designed for, but rather should account for the ways that smart home technologies are entangled with gendered identities and relations in everyday life.

Australia as site

Australia provides a key site through which to explore these issues, for several reasons. First, Australia has long since been an important site for the study of gender. In the 1990s RW Connell’s pioneering work on masculinities (Connell 1995) provided what was arguably the most insightful analysis of how gender and diversity were situated within a complex society. More recently, and in contrast to social commentary regarding the crisis of masculinity and rise of toxic masculinity, academic scholarship originating in Australia has highlighted the emergence of more inclusive masculinities (Roberts 2014). This article is not intended to be an empirical update on the state of masculinities in a digital Australian society, but it highlights the enduring point that we need to understand everyday masculinities as diverse and contingent, a point that pushes back against the dominant gendered narratives of smart home futures. Australia, has also, as accounted for in more detail below, emerged as a key site for scholarship about and empirical studies of how people live with smart technologies at home, ensuring a dynamic existing literature and set of insights to dialogue with (Dahlgren et al. 2021; Duque et al. 2021; Kennedy et al. 2015; Maalsen 2022; Sinanan and Horst 2021; Strengers and Nicholls 2018; Strengers and Kennedy 2020; Strengers, Dahlgren, and Nicholls 2022).

We specifically draw on online ethnographic research, undertaken with 72 Australian households across the states of Victoria and New South Wales in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. We had at least two online meetings with each household, including interviews, discussions of energy use data visualisations, future scenario comic strips, participant-led photographic video and written exercises, and online participant-led video tours of their homes. We also undertook a series of five short follow-up video-recorded documentary filmmaking in-person visits in 2021. To a lesser extent, we refer to our review of 64 industry reports relating to technology and energy in the home. Our methods were reflexive and collaborative; they involved deep, intensive and empathetic short-term ethnographic immersions (Pink and Morgan 2013) in participants’ lives, through which we sought to understand how they lived with new and emerging technologies and how this figured in relation to their everyday energy use.

Anthropologists who study households typically use the method of the home visit (Miller 2001), including the home video tour, through which to engage with people in their everyday lives in their homes (Pink 2004). In the research discussed here, we followed the established method of ‘short-term ethnography’ (Pink & Morgan 2013), which has been developed for and used over many design anthropological household ethnographies over more than two decades, to investigate in depth through the camera. Such deep investigations with families in their households would be impossible through traditional anthropological long-term ethnography, in part due to the intensity of the encounters that short-term ethnography creates and in part because it would be unrealistic and excessively costly (in researcher time and financially) to visit 72 households repeatedly over, for example, 12 months. In this article, we focus specifically on participants’ relationships to smart home technologies, but note that this is also a prism through which to understand household energy use. Participants were invited to lead the online video tours of their homes, maintaining control of what was revealed in these live activities as well as in the self-reported materials they created for us, and to contemplate the future comic strip scenarios with us. They were also asked if they would like us to use their real names or pseudonyms, and if they would like to check identifiable representations of them before publication.

The conceptual and critical question we pursue in this article involves how smart home masculinities are constituted in dominant narratives, the hegemonic masculinities that these narratives embody, and how we might respond to them through feminist design anthropology that is capable of critiquing the narratives of innovation that frame the smart home, showing how the gendered identities of people who live with smart homes are negotiated through everyday improvisatory actions. Our analysis reveals that not only is smart home technology not designed for diversity, but in addition, those for whom it most aligns tend to either continually question or troubleshoot it, or they improvise to redesign it to suit their lives. It is therefore not surprising that globally the smart home market has failed to come about as expected, or that Australians tend to be more interested in separate smart home devices than in full predesigned systems (Strengers et al. 2021).

Consequently, if we were to switch smart home design and the assumptions about what it can offer, towards real people in their homes, and argue for the home as the site of inclusive design, then we might be able to better constitute feminist future smart home narratives.

Dominant Narratives of the Smart Home

The smart home has long been a contemporary imaginary and aspirational ideal. Early representations, which highlighted how electricity and home appliances would liberate people from housework, promising new levels of luxury and leisure (Horrigan 1986), continue to permeate representations of the aspirational smart home (e.g. Darby 2018; Strengers and Kennedy 2020). The smart home can be defined as ‘a residence equipped with computing and information technology which anticipates and responds to the needs of the occupants, working to promote their comfort, convenience, security and entertainment through the management of technology within the home and connections to the world beyond’ (Aldrich 2003, 17). While there have been significant advances in technology since the initial concept of the smart home, its definition and vision (for seamless and anticipatory control of one’s environment) have remained largely unchanged. Importantly, and like many technology visions, this definition is still yet to be realised, remaining a proximate future (Dourish and Bell 2011). Rather than serving as a definition of real-life smart homes then, definitions for the smart home can be more productively understood as anticipated and continually performed imaginaries.

Feminists of technology have critiqued these narratives for both their lack of realism, and their highly gendered and heteronormative visions of domestic roles, labour and life. Combining ‘a curious mixture of nostalgia and futurism’, Spigel (2005, 219) argues that ‘the promotional rhetoric for smart homes offers a technological fix that allows women to be everywhere and everything at once’; while the man becomes ‘a superworker who does three jobs at once’ the woman becomes ‘a superwoman who combines motherhood and career’. Early feminist analyses of the smart home and domestic technologies cite the absence of housework from design visions and prototypes, and the undervaluing of feminine skills and knowledge, with ‘the technically-interested man’ implicitly positioned as the target consumer of smart devices (Cockburn 1997; Berg 1994, 176). More recent analyses have emphasised the smart home’s focus on creating ‘more time for father’ to engage in leisure with smart home entertainment and security systems (Strengers and Nicholls 2018, following Schwartz Cowan’s (1985) analysis of the industrial revolution of the home as freeing up ‘more time for mother’ through labour-saving domestic technologies). Other feminist analyses have highlighted the problematic positioning of smart technologies as housewives (Spigel 2005), ‘smart wives’ (Strengers and Kennedy 2020) or aesthetically white servants (Phan 2019) that reinforce stereotypes about gendered labour in the home.

More broadly, research suggests that smart home imaginaries enduringly promote technologically determinist and solutionist narratives that are aligned with a series of heteronormative personas. In a 2020 review of 64 technology and energy industry reports, Kari Dahlgren and colleagues found these reports’ future visions: treated people as individual technology consumers, and failed to acknowledge the messy and contingent elements of everyday life; excluded economically poorer and culturally and linguistically diverse households; saw futures through the prism of continuations of existing trends, and improvement of existing technologies; and tended to make claims about the impact of emerging technologies and systems such as AI, 5G, and blockchain, which failed to account for the possibility of uncertainty and failure (Dahlgren et al. 2020, 23). Thus presenting a future where emerging technologies can be seamlessly integrated into the lives of individuals, who will adopt and reap benefits from them. Moreover, in such narratives smart homes are pitched as offering solutions to a range of societal and environmental ‘problems’, which are however often dubiously defined, giving rise to the common criticism of smart home technologies as ‘solutions in search of a problem’ (Strengers and Kennedy 2020). The gendering of industry narratives about smart home devices and systems, and how their visions gender the people they imagine as using them forms a further layer to how they are both set within existing paradigms and relations of power. But as we develop further below, doing so simultaneously limits their capacity to deliver the technological solutions that they promise, precisely because they fundamentally misunderstand how gender and technology are constituted in everyday life.

What this reveals is an unreflexive or self-critical scientific paradigm. What the anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to as ‘big science’, which ‘believes it can already deliver the answer - or if not already, then in a future within its sights’ (Ingold 2021, 336). Where such big science believes that it can solve problems in the home by, for example, optimising energy use, creating greater convenience, and delivering personalised services to individuals, it follows the logics of an innovation paradigm that launches what is seen as finished products into the home-as-a-landing-site (Pink 2021); an approach that fails to account for how people improvise with new technologies beyond their designed-for use. Thus, whereas revised anthropology, in the 1990s, moved away from its masculine narratives of fieldwork, rendered in the symbolism of the male anthropologists penetrating the feminised (and often exoticised) ‘field’ (see Kulick and Willson 1995), the penetration of the otherwise analogue home by digital and emerging technologies, to be ‘accepted’ by users, which persists in dominant industry narratives is unfortunately anachronistic. It is typical of the gendered and colonising narratives that have endured in research, science and innovation for many years (Abdilla 2018). However while social scientists have sought to revise their approaches by critiquing the gendered (Kulick and Willson 1995) and colonising narratives of extractive fieldwork methods, often revolutionising whole disciplines, dominant (but not all) science and technology narratives tend to lag behind, reframing their ambitions towards ‘social good’. In Australia CSIRO’s ‘AI Roadmap for environmental and social good’ blog post tells us that ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the power to change life itself. We're using it to transform economies, unlock new societal and environmental value and accelerate scientific discovery’ (CSIRO’S DATA61 Editorial Team 2019). Unfortunately, however, things as significant as changing life itself, when done to people, rather than performed in collaboration with them, might change the sentiment but do not change the narrative. While using AI, automated and smart home technologies is for good well meaning, until they are used to generate good with people in everyday life situations, they might not be that good.

Indeed in the case of the smart home, we are also left wondering who these technological applications are good for. Internationally, Adam Richard Rottinghaus’ analysis has found the dominant narratives of smart homes to be framed by a ‘new white futurism’ (Rottinghaus 2021) and Thao Phan argues that ‘the figuration of domestic [voice] assistants in the image of domestic service speaks more to the historic dehumanization of working-class men and women of color than to the contemporary anthropomorphism of these digital assistants’ (Phan 2019) (see Lupton, Pink, and Horst 2021). Other scholars have unpacked these narratives to characterise personas that correspond with, or challenge, dominant industry visions. Four characters stand out about the energy sector – Strengers (2013) Resource Man, Johnson’s (2020) Flexibility Woman, Strengers and Kennedy’s (2020) Smart Wife and Kari Dahlgren and colleagues’ TechnoHedonist (2021). In brief, the analyses that construct these personas reveal a set of gendered narratives and relations that reproduce common techno-rationalist and -optimistic tropes about how people use smart devices in their homes (Resource Man, Techno Hedonist), how the devices are imbued with gendered stereotypes and biases (Resource Man, Smart Wife), and how they are strategically proposed by researchers to reveal the nuances of other ways in which people pursue energy reduction and management in their homes (Flexibility Woman). Whether proposed as imaginaries of the smart home and energy sectors or grounded in the realities of everyday life these characters do important work in both critiquing dominant consumer assumptions and opening up the field of smart technology design, development and use to a much broader set of actors and dynamics.

In addition to these critical perspectives on smart home narratives, there is moreover a vibrant field of research about how people live in their homes with new and emerging media and technologies, which also reveals the cracks in industry assumptions. This literature has not least developed about technology in Australian homes (including Kennedy et al. 2015; Strengers and Kennedy 2020; Strengers and Nicholls 2018; Hjorth et al. 2020; Duque et al. 2021; Lupton, Pink, and Horst 2021; Sinanan and Horst 2021). In particular, as digital technologies have started to become implicated in gendered relations of home, researchers have been concerned with the gendered nature of the new ‘digital housekeeping’ (Tolmie et al. 2007) which new technologies constitute in practice, or as Jenny Kennedy and colleagues put it: ‘how transformations within household media configurations give rise to new opportunities for ‘digital expertise’ under conditions of persistent gender inequalities’ (2015, 410). Jolynna Sinanan and Heather Horst have found in research about how diverse Australians organise their digital data, that the impacts of digital housekeeping go beyond simply the gendered division of household labour, but are also ‘intertwined with cultural and generational ideals of familial roles’ (2021, 1241). In short, anyone with access to the minimal resources required could become a ‘digital housekeeper’ and therefore the category opens up possibilities of accommodating diversity, and thus becomes a useful category to mobilise in considering inclusive design. As this work implies, digital housekeeping is always contextual, and in the case of heterosexual households, can be interpreted as both legitimate housework or as a non-essential hobby involving tinkering and play (Strengers and Nicholls 2018). Taking on board these existing findings, in this article we engage the concept of digital housekeeping to comment on how masculinities and relational gendered identities are being constituted relationally with smart home technologies and systems. In doing so we contribute to this emerging discussion of how digital housekeeping is coming about as an Australian phenomenon. However, our wider objective is to build on this discussion to identify how the smart home is implicated in masculinities as they are performed through digital housekeeping. Ultimately we are interested in what it would mean to design differently with diverse gendered identities in households.

Smart Husbands at Home

As noted above our online and documentary filmmaking ethnographies involved 72 Australian households. In this section, we account for our findings through a close discussion of our encounters with three households, which have been selected precisely because they demonstrate the wider findings of and issues raised by this project. That is to say that gendered digital housekeeping was evidenced across our sample, in many, but not all households, and different ways. This section aims to demonstrate how it manifests, by way of example, to demonstrate the principles by which it occurs, which are discussed in the penultimate section of this article.

Bob

Bob lived in the coastal area outside a small Australian city, with his wife, Kylie, and four children aged ⁣⁣2, 6 and 8. Both white Australians, from this same part of the country, they had bought a spacious suburban house about a year ago and drove two big cars. They both worked from home for 1 and 3 days respectively, and shared looking after the children and many domestic tasks, which he generally considered himself to be more effective at, and said found it ‘a bit frustrating’ because, he said, ‘I’m a bit neat and she’s very messy’.

Once they had moved in, Bob had some time off work and had spent part of this getting the house set up. The previous owner of their house had been in the domestic technologies business, so that house was set up with more appliances than they needed, and an extensive indoor and outdoor lighting system. As Bob described, invoking enduring agency of the previous owner: ‘he’s got a big commercial aircon unit so it’s a massive unit with two big fans’, going on to explain that ‘you can set it in zones but if you’re doing zones in the lounge room for example, it goes all the way up the stairs’. Bob had kept in touch with the previous owner and his presence was clear during our interview as Bob described how he would go back to him to understand how the home technology was set up.

Bob had also installed solar panels about a year before our interview, and often used the solar energy to power the pump, filtration and heating for the outdoor pool and the spa underneath the house. Over time Bob had learned how to set these technologies to come on automatically and to optimise his use of solar energy. As he described it:

it’s got a sensor that can tell how warm the water is up in those panels, up on the roof, so it detects what the temperature is on the roof, and I’ll set the timer from 12 o’clock through to 5 o’clock … so really, they sort of work in together and so when the solar in the house is working well and most efficient, that’s when the solar for the pool’s running, and if it’s an overcast day, the solar for the pool just won’t run.

He had also put some work into getting the right internet connection set up for his family, consulting with someone responsible for IT systems in a company he used to work for. Other remnants of the presence of the previous owner were that ‘he’s got the sprinkler system which runs on a timer’ and the home security system, including a security camera, which Bob was planning to speak to him about as they hadn’t yet used it. Yet however well he had researched the Wi-Fi set-up, this could still be messed up by power outages.

Bob and Kylie’s smart home system connected some of their appliances, and in an area where there were sometimes power outages, this created difficulties. Bob described how this impacted on family routines ‘because your Wi-Fi, because it goes out and, yeah, you can’t open the fridge doors’. The first time it happened at night and Bob had just arrived home from soccer training with his son, he recalled how: ‘I just said, let’s just go out for dinner, so we went out for dinner instead’. The home also had a smart security system, which he was engaged with but Kylie was not. Bob described how in a recent power outage, Kylie had called him up just as she was leaving to collect the kids from school in a panic, ‘going, “the door won’t open, the garage door won’t open”’ he explained that the front door was also automatic, and ‘she didn’t know how to get out of the house. And you know, I just said, you’ve just got to pull the cord on the garage door and lift it. … And I had to take her through it’.

Another legacy from the previous owner, and this time his wife, involved the way the outdoor lights were organised. Bob said that ‘It’s almost like day time, so there’s three lots of floodlights – over the clothesline, over the pool, and just outside the laundry, and his wife is a bit OCD. She’s labelled everything, so you know what everything is’ which was something he personally thought had ‘been handy’. Kylie, in contrast, Bob felt, had a different relationship to the lights, she would just switch all the lights on, whereas he considered himself to use them more thoughtfully.

Murphy

Murphy, an engineer, and his wife Gemma, both white Australians, lived in a townhouse in the CBD of a small Australian city, with their two children – a baby and a preschooler aged 4. Both worked part time and shared the childcare and domestic responsibilities; the only division that he mentioned was that his wife would tend to write their (digital) shopping lists and he had the more ‘gross’ task of emptying the litter for their four indoor cats. Murphy, with his interest in technology was also responsible for the smart home devices and system, which he set up himself with an Apple Home Kit platform, which he described as: ‘It’s a home automation platform so basically everything in the house is controllable from an app on the, on your phone or via Siri voice control’. He also regarded Apple Home as ‘somewhat more private to a point than say Google or Amazon systems’. In some instances where he had wanted smart technologies that the platform didn't offer he had developed them himself, using a bridging package to make them compatible, and had collaborated with online tech communities. They also had solar panels and a battery which Murphy was responsible for. When we asked Murphy how his wife felt about the technologies he said:

I mean as long as it’s entertaining me I don’t think she minds. She finds some utility in it. Like so it’s handy for her to be able to turn all the lights off with one click of a button on a particular app or to open the blinds by just asking, telling, you know saying on her watch open all the blinds without having to like physically go to each one and yeah so she finds some utility in it but she’s probably thinking it’s not worth the effort.

Their relationship with the system involved a mixture of automated processes which they had set themselves and their hands-on operation of their technologies via the app, In Murphy’s words: ‘Lots of stuff going on in the background but lots of interaction with the app to, you know, check room temperatures, what’s best with his room temperature because that’s the only thing we can control’. Their lighting system was another good example of this mixed mode of use. Murphy said that while ‘turning lights on and off we use the app for that a lot’, the lights ‘we’ve got a lot of hue lights around the house that would just come on automatically … as dusk approaches’, as well as material light switches on the walls.

Murphy had also set up a heating and cooling system, for which he had ‘set up themes in certain scenarios to come depending on the day of the week’ with ‘individual sensors in terms of temperature in most of the house’. For instance, when his son was younger they had ‘the little controller if you like that you can program themes into and I’d have it monitoring his room and when it dropped below say 19 or 18 degrees it would come on in winter and then once it got above say 23 the air conditioner would shut down’. Although more broadly, Murphy said ‘a lot of the time we just use it manually’, in ways that involved using the technology ‘we’ll go oh it’s a bit chilly in here, what’s the temperature in the pool room for instance or the living room, we’ll look at the sensor and it’ll tell us and we’ll go yeah that’s a reasonable time to turn the air conditioner on’.

Murphy explained how the system worked, frequently backing up all his data in the cloud and on a hard drive. He had set up many smart devices within this system, including speakers all over the house so that music could be played simultaneously in different rooms through the app. He planned to install motorised automated blinds on a balcony renovation that he hoped would go ahead post-pandemic, as well as water leak sensors for pipe leaks and bathroom flooding.

We asked Murphy if his wife was also ‘techie and confident about the house?’ he told us that he ‘wouldn’t say so, no … but it’s set up in such a way that anyone could get a handle on how to use it’. She didn’t have any issues controlling the house but would sometimes call him to help with the ‘TV and stuff. I don’t know why but sometimes she has a bit of a struggle with that’, but he continued, ‘fortunately I don’t really go away, so it’s never an issue’.

Murphy had also set up a smart system to open and close the garage door, showing us around his garage he explained how a module ‘interfaces between Siri and the internet and the garage door … [to] electrically push the button of a standard garage door’. He explained that this could be installed with no programming, noting that his ‘wife wouldn’t be able to do it but it’s not exceptionally hard’. Prompted by the experiences that Bob had described, we asked if Murphy’s wife would need to worry about losing power and not being able to open the doors. Murphy explained how ‘No, my wife doesn’t have to worry about it’ since if they lost power ‘the alarm system’s got a battery back-up, so that’s not an issue’ and ‘even if she lost her phone or whatever … , it’s manually possible to disarm and arm it’. The door locks (including the garage door) had keypads to ‘actually operate it normally’. More broadly he had set the system up so that ‘everything sits in conjunction or next to your standard means of operating, so there’s no issue there’.

The automated and connected washing machine was something that they were both more engaged with, particularly in using the smartphone notifications sent to both of them when it was finished and ready for the laundry to be hung out, to ensure that they both knew and would not forget and have to do it again. But Murphy also had his limits, reflecting that:

Although you may think I’d make everything smart in this house, I don’t really see the point in a smart fridge or a smart oven or anything like that. Generally, I’m going to be right next to the device when I’m operating it. I wasn’t that interested in that sort of stuff.

Paul

Paul and his wife Mags, originally from overseas and had moved to Australia a few years ago from a third country, lived in a large new suburban house outside a big Australian city. At the time we interviewed them they both worked from home as consultants, Paul in IT and his wife in finance. They had two young primary school-aged children. Both were keen on automation, as long as, as Paul put it, he had the override button. When they made decisions about technology purchases, as well as things like having their solar panels installed, they followed their professional expertise, with Paul’s focus on technology being balanced by Mags’s financial expertise.

Paul and Mags had many smart home devices, including, for example, a robotic vacuum cleaner, and a complex set of smart lights which they used to create mood, as Paul put it ‘The movie mode is the whole house dark … and for … guests it’s more vibrant … we have different colours setting as well’. Paul explained that the smart lights are managed by sensors, most of the time, which helps them to save energy, and when they have guests they ‘override the rules’.

The couple shared the domestic and childcare tasks and used smart technologies to connect to their domestic schedule, where their Alexa voice assistant reminds them to do anything from changing the beds to charging the camera. They also used a smart system to access weather forecasts for them daily so that they can plan for when they will use other appliances such as the dishwasher and washing machine in relation to their solar energy.

Mags usually needed to be convinced of the merits of new smart home devices, and when we met them Paul was arguing for installing automated blinds. Mags told us ‘ … and I’m thinking, wow, you know, that’s going to be our next project. Take your time. [laughs]’. Paul responded that it would be very easy for him to make a device that pulled the blind up and down and, to back up his argument he pointed out how ‘we have the northern sun that really destroyed our leather sofa’ and this could be prevented by a device that was tracking the sun’s movement, and operated the blinds so they would stop the sun from shining on the sofa.

When Mags outlined how she found Alexa’s reminders to be helpful, Paul told us that this was a ‘strong statement’ for her, since she had not always been so keen. According to Paul, when they had first put the smart lights in Mags ‘was, ‘oh what a waste of time Paul, because the time you have to spend to work with it, optimise it and me adapt to it’’. He explained that this had taken about 3–6 months, and hadn’t worked for Mags, since as an accountant she would want an immediate result. It had taken him ‘a few optimisations’ to get the lights working in sync with the sunset, but that finally, everyone had been happy with it.

Paul as the person responsible for setting these systems up was also responsible for their maintenance, sometimes this involves the ongoing fine adjustments as above, and others the more laborious tasks of, for example when having to change Wi-Fi passwords for every device. For Paul, as a software engineer who had originally been an IT device engineer, meant that he spent ‘a lot of my hobby time on it’, as he put it, ‘my wife can vouch for it because when I telling her, “I don’t have time for this” and she say “Oh, but you have time for all your device” and I say “Well … ”’.

Smart Home Husbands

In this section, we draw out the insights and implications from these ethnographic cases, and where wives are situated about digital housekeeping masculinities. Four relevant themes emerge across these three cases.

First, all of the men took responsibility for the smart technologies and systems in the family home, they undertook the digital housekeeping, including the installation, setting up and maintenance of the system. They had all committed time to working on their homes, including getting new technologies set up. Bob had not worked for the first months in his and Kylie's new house and had spent this time getting their solar energy system and the modes of automation connected to its set up. Paul prioritised time in his life for smart home technologies, as his hobby. Murphy also dedicated significant time to designing and developing his smart home systems, beyond the possibilities offered by the manufacturers. All three men also had other men to talk to about technology systems, in Bob’s case the previous owner, while Murphy’s participated in online techie communities, and Paul worked in the field. In this sense, although their wives were not completely isolated from their smart home developments, they can be seen as something these men did, usually with other men, in a kind of masculine hobby space, or what might be seen as a digital version of the shed (Strengers and Nicholls 2018; Strengers, Dahlgren, and Nicholls 2022).

The contingent and improvisatory nature of their engagements with smart home technologies and systems stands out. Bob’s smart home technologies depended on the legacy of the previous owner, and the set-ups created by installers. His actions tended to be contingent on these existing devices and infrastructures, and his troubleshooting when they went wrong. Murphy’s approach to the smart home was often responsive to needs and opportunities that arose at home: the smart baby devices, and heating and cooling technologies they used were derived from wanting their baby, who was a bad sleeper, to get a good night sleep and the plans for smart blinds on the balcony were made possible by the balcony renovation. In this way, Murphy participated in caring masculinities (Elliott 2016) involving expressions of technical femininity (Rode 2011). Murphy improvised within what was possible to create the smart home that he wanted, collaborating in online communities to do so at times. Paul had improvised to make his system work as he would like, buying the equipment he needed, and negotiating with Mags to create the automated systems that would benefit their family. These dimensions of their digital housekeeping have a particular hobbyist element to them as found in past studies (Kennedy et al. 2015; Strengers and Nicholls 2018), but did not occur in isolation from the rest of their families, rather they were undertaken in dialogue with the family and home (Sinanan and Horst 2021).

Second, in each case, although different for each family, the men portrayed their wives as not sharing their interest or competence in using smart home technologies and systems but in finding them useful to some extent. Murphy had intentionally set up everything so that his wife could easily use it, and so that a manual option was always available, and commented that he never went away so she would not need to confront any challenges of using it on her own. Paul told us how Mags had been sceptical about the technologies until the practical or financial benefit of having them was evident. Bob described how Kylie, who was not that interested in their smart home technologies, had found herself locked inside and unable to get out of the house on her own when there was a power outage. Thus, here digital housekeeping enabled these men to perform, and continuously develop and reinvent their spheres of expertise in the home, in such a way that needed to be navigated with, and sometimes sounded like something that was tolerated or indulged by, their wives. This described as the ‘wife acceptance factor’ by a smart home industry professional (in Strengers and Kennedy’s 2020), highlights how women in heterosexual couples are often positioned as the gatekeepers of smart technologies, ensuring that men ‘prove’ the worth of smart devices before they are accepted into the main dwelling (Strengers, Dahlgren, and Nicholls 2022).

Third, all of the men shared, or perceived that they shared, an equal balance of domestic tasks with their wives. In two cases they used smart home technologies to organise and schedule some domestic tasks, or the rhythms of domestic life. For instance, Murphy had set up their smart washing machine to ensure that he and Gemma remembered to hang out the laundry, and Paul had set up Alexa to remind him and Mags to follow their task schedule. Bob, who had no such system, felt frustrated that Kylie was messy and, for instance, didn't do the laundry to the same rhythms as he would like. This is one of the most interesting findings as regards gendered modes of organising and rationalising housework, and must also be understood in the context of sharing domestic chores. This is not to say that women do not find digital scheduling of this kind useful, rather it signals a very different way of knowing and engaging with the everyday routines of the home, to that associated with traditional feminine sensory and embodied modes of knowing and performing housework (Pink 2004).

Fourth, all of the households were keen to keep control over their smart home technologies, in fact none of them had simply installed an existing smart home system but rather they had selected technologies that suited their own lives, or in the case of Bob, that had suited the life of the previous owner of their home. Further, none were aiming for the smart home aspirational definition of seamless and intuitive control of normal household activities by the home and technology itself, either because they did not see this as a realistic aspiration, or simply did not find it to be desirable.

Collectively these findings indicate that in these homes (and by implication across many Australian homes) smart home systems and devices have become available to participants through a masculine narrative, relationships between men, and subsequent or relational dialogues between couples. They have been situated and justified as hobbyist, indulged or tolerated, but appreciated for their practical benefits, when these become evident, and are implicated in co-parenting and domestic task sharing. Importantly they are designed, or maintained and further developed within the home, by men who live in these households.

This creates an interesting configuration for smart home design. Here design is resituated in the home, rather than being driven by whole-of-system industry-produced smart home installations. Yet, because they arrive in the home through masculine hobbyists, techie forums and are often installed at home by men who have expertise in engineering and IT, they are inevitably shaped by the masculine narratives that inform the industry development and design of the technologies, and those that characterise the lives of the men concerned. As such, there emerge a series of questions around how and why women are less involved and engaged in these processes, why smart home systems and technologies are less accessible to women, and other diverse groups, and what the implications of this are for equitable smart homes.

Re-thinking for Feminist Smart Home Design

The fact that scholars like Strengers (2013), Strengers and Kennedy (2020), and Dahlgren et al. (2021) have been able to work backwards from dominant discourses about smart home systems and devices to demonstrate the kinds of personas they open up technology futures for, or to propose currently unaccounted for alternatives (e.g. Johnson’s (2020) Flexibility Woman), is concerning. It suggests there has been a failure to acknowledge that smart homes will be constituted and experienced through gendered relations, and that how smart homes are currently designed are better aligned with particular masculinities.

Feminist design anthropology requires us to view the role technologies play in people’s lives from the ground up, that is from the sites of everyday life where they become part of roles and relationships. Our research suggests that a key way in which this comes about can be conceptualised through the idea of digital housekeeping. This as we have shown is an inevitable facet of installing, living and learning with, and maintaining smart home systems and devices, needs to be acknowledged for the place it has in making smart home living a reality. Once we do recognise digital housekeeping as a facet of everyday life, and correspondingly as a valid and relevant category for analysis, then we can open up the important question of how it might be designed with, in such a way that makes it open and accessible to different, more diverse and equitable gender configurations. Therefore, once we can identify what is happening in people’s lives and how gendered relations are implicated with technologies we can set about considering how and where forms of exclusion lie and where the possibilities for making technologies more inclusive could be developed.

While we contribute to literature about digital housekeeping, however, we emphasise that we are proposing a mode of scholarship that goes beyond a simple empirical-conceptual interest in the emergence of this phenomena. Rather our interest in digital housekeeping is in mobilising this concept within a wider agenda to inform inclusive smart home design. The case of digital housekeeping in the smart home invites us to consider what a feminist smart home technology and system design process might look like. It would, we propose, go beyond the simple idea of responding to the masculinities of the dominant techno solutionist narratives by calling for diversity and inclusivity in design, to instead ask how contemporary masculinities themselves defy these narratives, and subsequently how by including men in a category of ‘digital housekeepers’ which can equally be occupied by people of other genders, we can move towards an approach that acknowledges diversity. This means a process of design that is created in the sites of the everyday where smart home technology is encountered; developed collaboratively and iteratively with all the people in the home who may wish to use it, to be open to a range of gendered experiences and processes; be installed as a living process, rather than a fait accompli with benefits.

Future research is needed to create a model for inclusive home-based smart home technology design. In this article, we have set the ground for this, by demonstrating what the problem space is and how it might be shifted towards a new set of possibilities.

Acknowledgements

First, we thank all our research participants, since without them this article would not have been possible. The research discussed in this article is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding Scheme (‘Digital Energy Futures’ project number LP180100203) in partnership with Monash University, Ausgrid, AusNet Services and Energy Consumers Australia. The ethics for the Digital Energy Futures project were approved by Monash University’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Grant Number LP180100203].

Notes on contributors

Sarah Pink

Sarah Pink is Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, Australia. Sarah is a design and futures anthropologist, a methodological innovator and documentary filmmaker, specialising in questions related to the relationship between people, environment and emerging technologies in possible futures. She is an advocate for bringing together academic and engaged scholarship and interdisciplinary collaboration towards a future-focused approach to social science research and practice. Her gender-focused research includes her books Women and Bullfighting (1997) and Home Truths (2004). Her recent works include the books Design Ethnography (2022), Energy Futures (2022) and Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2023) and the documentaries Smart Homes for Seniors (2021) and Digital Energy Futures (2022).

Yolande Strengers

Yolande Strengers is Professor of Digital Technology and Society in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, Australia, where she leads the Energy Futures research program. Yolande is a digital sociologist and human–computer interaction scholar who investigates the inclusion and sustainability outcomes of smart and emerging technologies. Her work on gender and technology is informed by feminist science and technology studies. She has investigated the effects of the feminisation of digital voice assistants and robots (The Smart Wife, MIT Press, 2020 with Dr Jenny Kennedy) and identified the ideal masculine energy consumer, “Resource Man”, who shapes energy policy and industry interventions (Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life, Palgrave Macmillan 2013). Yolande has published extensively on smart homes, including gendered industry visions and imaginaries; digital housekeeping and the changing division of labour; and gendered interest, uptake and use of smart home technologies. She is also a vocal advocate for gender equity in STEM and is advancing collaborations between the social sciences and the field of artificial intelligence.

Rex Martin

Rex Martin is Research Fellow at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Drawing on sociology, human geography and ethnography, Rex's work explores the everyday experiences and knowledge of people living with renewable energy technologies and tools, including solar PV, battery storage and energy feedback. His research explores smart (energy) technologies, lay knowledge, gendered ‘energy housekeeping’, and experiences of changing weather and climate.

Kari Dahlgren

Kari Dahlgren is Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Kari is a social anthropologist and ethnographer with a PhD from the London School of Economics. Her work is situated at the intersection of environmental and digital anthropology, with a particular interest in the anthropology of energy, climate change, and transition and how these fields are entangled with digital technologies and future imaginations of technological change. Kari’s research speaks to the possibilities and limitations of imagining and crafting futures and contributes to the building of diverse and sustainable digital futures.