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Back to the shed: gendered visions of technology and domesticity

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Abstract

One of the tropes of the age of ubiquitous computing is the migration of computation into new spaces. Domestic environments have been a particular focus of attention for many. However, these spaces are neither empty nor neutral. They are already populated by people and practices which shape both their physical form and cultural meaning. We want to consider here some questions of technology and domesticity. In order to give some critical perspective, we want to approach domestic space from the edge, and in particular, from the shed.

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Notes

  1. This material is drawn from InsideAsia [1]; a multi-sited ethnographic project that Bell undertook between 2001 and 2003. Australian households were compensated for their participation, and have been guaranteed privacy. Thus throughout this paper material drawn from those and other interviews and household visits is disguised through pseudonyms.

  2. “Dunny” is an Australian slang term for an outdoor toilet.

  3. The English Heritage Trust currently lists more than 50 ‘sheds of special interest,’ and exhibits on sheds in Brighton and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum have garnered considerable interest [5], etc)

  4. Of course, shearing sheds—he objects of Lawson’s reflection—occupy a very particular space in Australian culture and history. Early unionization efforts were directing at shearing sheds and their shearers.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under awards 0133749, 0205724, 0326105, 0527729, and 0524033, by a grant from the Intel Research Council and by Intel Research and Intel’s Digital Home Group. The authors wish to thank the staff of Portland’s Queen of Sheba who witnessed the birth of this paper and continued to serve us anyway. We would also like to acknowledge Josh Rohrbach, Melinda Stelzer, Diane Bell, Katrina Jungnickel, Mark Thomson, John Davies and Brian David Johnson who have all played along with extraordinary grace and good humor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Genevieve Bell

  2. University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Paul Dourish

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  1. Genevieve Bell
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  2. Paul Dourish
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Correspondence to Genevieve Bell.

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Bell, G., Dourish, P. Back to the shed: gendered visions of technology and domesticity. Pers Ubiquit Comput 11, 373–381 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-006-0073-8

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