Weekly Planner Digitizer: Domestic Technologies in Hybrid Spaces

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

This paper deals with a domestic technology, the Weekly Planner Digitizer (WPD), that was designed by residents of a co-living space in Munich, Germany. Co-living spaces invite entrepreneurs to live and work together under one roof. In this context, the WPD is designed to help residents keep track of domestic tasks such as cleaning by automatically assigning them to people each week. If residents fail to fulfill their task within a given time, the person’s photo together with the unfinished task are shown on a screen at the entrance of the co-living space. Furthermore, some money is withdrawn from their account as a fee which is then shared among the ones that accomplish their task successfully.

Feminist STS has long pondered “the gendering impact of the modern division of labour” (Bray, 2007) and focused on studying domestic technologies such as the microwave oven (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993), the telephone (Martin, 1991), and the contraceptive pill (Oudshoorn, 2003). However, such technologies are generally investigated at purely domestic spaces. This paper rethinks domestic technologies by studying them in hybrid spaces in which domestic and professional practices are entangled to one another.

Drawing on feminist STS, this paper shows, how the domestic technology of the WPD shapes residents’ practices of co-living and how femininities and masculinities are performed around it. Moreover, it aims to elucidate the use of techniques of display and abashment as a way of enforcing the performance of domestic tasks. Empirically, participant observation and in-depth interviews are employed.

Author

• Cansu Güner, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS)