The Ins and Outs of Home Networking: The Case
for Useful and Usable Domestic Networking
REBECCA E. GRINTER, W. KEITH EDWARDS, MARSHINI CHETTY, ERIKA
SHEHAN POOLE, JA-YOUNG SUNG, JEONGHWA YANG
School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
and
ANDY CRABTREE, PETER TOLMIE, TOM RODDEN, CHRIS GREENHALGH,
STEVE BENFORD
School of Computer Science and IT, University of Nottingham

________________________________________________________________________

Abstract: Home networks are increasingly being adopted as a solution to technical complexity in the home:
multiple computers, devices, and users are driving the demand. Current network solutions are derived from the
world of work and provide poor support for the needs of the home. We present the key findings to emerge from
qualitative studies of home networks in the UK and US. The studies reveal two key kinds of work that effective
home networking relies upon: one, the technical work of setting up and maintaining the home network, and the
other, the collaborative and socially organized work of the home in which the network is embedded and
supports. The two are thoroughly intertwined and rely upon one another for their realization, yet neither is
adequately supported by current networking technologies and applications. Explication of the ‘work to make the
home network work’ opens up the design space for the continued integration of the home network in domestic
life and elaboration of future support. Key issues for development include the development of networking
facilities that do not require advanced networking knowledge, that are flexible and support the local social order
of the home and the evolution of its routines, and which ultimately make the home network visible and
accountable to household members.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces –
Miscellaneous
General Terms:
Additional Key Words and Phrases:
________________________________________________________________________
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-#0626281 and the EPSRC, through the
Equator project. Rebecca E. Grinter, and W. Keith Edwards were resident at the University of Nottingham when
this research was conducted.
Authors' addresses: School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, Georgia 30308, United States of America. School of Computer Science and IT, University of
Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
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© 2010 ACM
1. INTRODUCTION
In the last decade, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research has moved out of the
office and into the home. While much is different between the two domains, empirical
and technical interest in computer networks is not, either on the part of product
developers, end-users, or IT researchers. Simply put, the home is an increasingly
networked entity, comprising a multitude of connected devices and services distributed
throughout the home. This trend towards the home network is being driven by a number
of needs: sharing a single computer in a single location is an increasingly unrealistic

proposition for household members; other devices in the home have to share access to the
Internet; devices also and increasingly need to communicate with each other as well.
Consequently the networked home has rapidly become a part of domestic computing. The
purpose of this paper is to present the results of a series of research studies that explore
the work householders engage in to embed computing in domestic life and thus ‘make the
home network work’. These studies were conducted in two countries, the United
Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). Each focused on the work required to
integrate the network into everyday life in the home [Grinter et al. 2005; Tolmie et al.
2007]. Prior to presenting our studies, we review research related to four key features of
technology uptake and use in the home: adoption of domestic technology, communication,
computing, and networking. We then describe our methods, and the households that
participated in our research. Our reflection on these studies is presented in two sections
each with a distinct focus. First we describe the work it takes to set up a network and the
devices on it and then, second; we consider the practical work required for ongoing
maintenance, which we characterize as ‘digital housekeeping’. Finally, in discussion, we
turn to our main point which is that the work of domestic networking relies a) on
technical work to construct the network which is poorly supported by design at this point
in time and b) on collaborative work that embeds the home network in everyday life and
opens up new possibilities for design. We conclude that our studies suggest the need for
HCI involvement in a more radical reconsideration of the nature of the networked
domestic infrastructure.
2. RELATED WORK: STUDIES OF THE DOMESTIC
Over the last ten years HCI research has built a significant corpus of knowledge about
domestic technology. In this section we review key literature from the HCI community,
as well as work that pre-dates HCI but speaks to questions of technology in a domestic
context. We caveat this section by noting that although much of this research has been
conducted across a range of different countries, it has largely focused on those that
qualify as ‘Westernized-industrial settings’. Therefore, it is important to state that this
research (our own included) makes certain assumptions that may not hold true – or at
least may not be quite the same – in other parts of the world where domestic technologies
are beginning to take hold, such as in the Global South. Nevertheless, while we recognize
that the ways in which technology is woven into everyday life exhibits distinct cultural
differences, the current limitations of network technology and the collaborative character
of the work that use necessarily relies on speak to broad concerns. After all, whether we

live in New York or the Yemen we still have to create and maintain the home network
and incorporate it into the cultural milieu. Creating and maintaining the local home
network, and incorporating the network into the immediate social environment, are issues
that cut across a great many cultural distinctions and divides.
2.1 Adopting Domestic Technologies
Although a relatively new focus for HCI, the study of the history of the adoption of
domestic technologies is an established concern. For example, at the turn of the 20th
Century domestic scientists focused on studying a variety of technical systems and their
role in supporting ‘housework’. In the 1950s Lillian Gilbreth applied scientific
management techniques, and time and motion studies in particular, to redesign both
domestic practice and the physical layout of the home to make housework more efficient
[Gilbreth et al. 1954]. The results of Gilbreth’s ‘domestic engineering’ influenced the
built structure of the home, shaping the ‘magic triangle’ kitchen layout that became
widespread throughout the Western world. Indeed, the 1950s was a boom time for
domestic engineering as white goods and a host of novel labour saving devices flooded
the market. Their uptake was accompanied by a growing understanding of the systems
that comprise the home: new indoor plumbing facilities and how they supported the
movement of water in to, and waste out of, the home [Leavitt 2002].
The inter-relation between these emerging technologies and home life became a
subject of some interest. For example, feminist scholars in the 1960s questioned role of
technology in domestic work [Ravetz 1965] and it continues to be debated up to the
present day. Cowan’s seminal study of housework, for example, focuses on the gap
between the promise of domestic technologies and the reality of housework [Cowan
1983]. She notes that while domestic technologies such as washing machines were
marketed to women as ‘labour saving’ devices, their adoption did not save as much time
as promised. Rather, it triggered a change in expectations about how often people would
change their clothes. So although washing was no longer a fully manual chore, the
amount to be washed increased significantly. More generally Cowan argued for a broader
analysis of what it means for technology to be adopted and that there is a particular need
for us to explore the patterns of action and interaction that actually surround a system.
This, in turn, may enable us to establish whether initial visions of labour saving (or any
other promissory note) inherent within a technology actually exist in practice, or whether
work shifts from one type of activity to another.
Surveys of labour in the home continue to suggest that women bear the chief
responsibility for housework tasks such as cooking and cleaning. However, other studies

also point to different kinds of home labour (such as Do It Yourself), and include
activities such as the assembly and maintenance of home electronics including audio-
visual (AV) systems [Gelber 1997]. In our work we took a broad view of what
constituted digital housekeeping focusing on the work being done.
Whatever the actual status of domestic work with respect to its gendered character, it
is clear that the study of domestic technologies has a long history of looking at the
relationship between infrastructure (including the built environment), the technology
within it, and the work involved in using it. A dominant analytic perspective has emerged
that focuses on the relationship between gender and technology, particularly on
understanding who is doing the work and accounting for the role of technology in terms
of the broader social order. The research reported here suspends a concern with gender in
the study of technology [Grinter et al. 2005; Chetty et al. 2007; Tolmie et al. 2007] and
focuses, for reasons of design, on the practicalities of technology use in the home. We are
less concerned at this point in time with whom as we are with what, though we take
seriously the advice that we should look at the actual patterns of action and interaction or
‘work’ that surround technology. In this respect we suggest that our research may offer
scholars of domestic life concrete insights into the nature of domestic work, how
technology supports or hinders that work, and what the relationship between technology
and housework encompasses.
2.2 Domestic Communications
Ever since the widespread adoption of the home telephone people have asked questions
about the impact of communication technologies on domestic life. In the early 1900s, for
example, executives of Bell (which was growing in dominance in the US telephone
industry) worried about the recreational uses of the telephone. Indeed they went as far as
to actively discourage the use of the telephone for social calls through advertising.
Nonetheless it was the sociability of the phone, and its use in the domestic context in
particular, that drove uptake and use and ultimately shaped the adoption patterns
associated with this technology in the US at least [Fischer 1997]. Studies of
communication technologies in the home have and are perennially accompanied by
concerns with its effects on people, children and teenagers included. With respect to the
home telephone researchers have suggested that the technology ‘depersonalizes’
communication and has been responsible (at least in part) for the increased sexual
liberation of American teenagers [Lynd and Lynd 1929]. Similar concerns, and moral
panics, have permeated analyses of successive communications technologies, including
radio, television, mobile phones, and computers [Millwood et al. 2006]. Discussion of the

impacts of communications technologies on the inhabitants of the home is now a standard
part of social commentaries on what it means to communicate from within the home and,
in turn, what it means to use digital technologies for that purpose.
The telephone still plays a central role in domestic communications [Palen et al.
2000; Palen and Salzman 2002] and despite the intentions of those early telephone
executives, it remains a device in use (particularly by women) to promote and reinforce
familial and social ties [Anderson et al. 1999; Anderson et al. 2002]. However, the last
decade has seen the wholesale arrival of the mobile phone and computer in the home,
both of which have come to be used within the context of domestic communication.
Examination of Short Messaging Service (SMS) – a text-based communications system
originally available on Groupe Spéciale Mobile (GSM) networks but subsequently
replicated on other wireless systems – provides some insight into the roles that domestic
communications fulfil. SMS research has often focused on teenagers because they were
among the earliest adopters of this technology for communications purposes [Ling 2000;
Grinter and Eldridge 2001; Taylor and Harper 2002]. These studies report a variety of
findings that uncover how SMS fits into the everyday circumstances that teenagers find
themselves in: being able to transcend the physical limitations of circumstance, for
example, and talk to friends at a distance; working around the schedule constraints
imposed by the family; and using SMS to coordinate activities in real-time as opposed to
having to arrange events and meetings in advance, etc.
Just as mobile phones have been rapidly appropriated into domestic communication,
then so too have computers. In addition to email, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and Instant
Messaging have all found a place within the home [Grinter and Palen 2002; Livingstone
2002; Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002; Turow and Kavanaugh 2003]. Indeed in a
comparative study that sought to answer the question of what drives people to use
computing, Kraut et al. [1999] found that householders tended to be drawn to
communication activities over information activities. Recent surveys in the UK similarly
revealed that over 75% of computer use in the home revolves around communication,
with 99% of survey respondents saying they use it to read and send email; 56% for
instant messaging; 26% for chat rooms, and 13% for Internet telephone [OII 2005]. For
over a century the landline telephone has been one of the primary technologies of
communication for householders. However, in the last 20 years other technologies,
mostly noticeably the mobile phone and the computer have augmented it. Further, some
of these new digital technologies and means of communication have been built on the
telephone’s infrastructure. Today, modems, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) routers and

WiFi piggyback on a global communications infrastructure and are rapidly populating the
home to make new forms of communication possible.
2.3 Domestic Computing
Mirroring previous interests surrounding other technologies the growing popularity of
personal computing throughout the 1980s domestic computer use emerge as a distinct
research focus. One of the earliest studies of domestic computer use highlighted the use
of computers for telecommuting – using a modem in the home to connect to the corporate
network. In the mid 1980s telecommuting was in its infancy and being positioned as a
new mode of working. An initial survey of 282 homes [Vitalari et al. 1985] highlighted
the makeup of these early adopters of computers revealing (somewhat unsurprisingly)
that 96% of telecommuters were male with a higher than average education level, that
63% of respondents reported being in a technical profession, and that the computer was
used for purposes of work. More significantly, they noted that time spent on the computer
was a trade-off against other activities that take place in the home, and that having a
computer at home was a significant commitment, requiring technical knowledge to set up,
run, and maintain. Ten years later Alladi Venkatesh [1996] saw different uses of the
computer in the home. The rapid adoption of Internet technologies – in particular email
and the web – had changed what it was possible to accomplish with a computer at home.
Domestic computer use was becoming increasingly diverse (a trend that continues today,
and has been well captured by HCI research). Studies showed that in addition to
telecommuting, recreational uses were also emerging which focused on using the
resources of the Internet in support of home leisure activities [Kraut et al. 1996;
Venkatesh 1996]. In the UK, a 2005 national survey reported that 77% of respondents
reported using the Internet to plan and make travel arrangements, 54% for downloading
music, 48% for playing games, and 18% for managing their photo collections. 50% used
it for online shopping, 45% for banking, and 30% for paying bills [OII 2005]. Outside of
this, 40% used it for accessing central and local government services. Creative use such
as developing web pages and blogs was reported as being engaged in by 20% of the
survey population and surfing the net, particularly in relation to local concerns (such as
weather, traffic, and local news information) was reported by almost all respondents.
While communication remains at the forefront of computer use in the home, domestic
computing has clearly burgeoned over the last decade. This has been accompanied by a
growing interest in domestic computing by the HCI community to explore the possibility
of designing applications for the home [Mateas et al. 1996; O'Brien and Rodden 1997].
One major line of domestic research has focused on understanding the routines of the

home, including those implicated in technology use. This research has sought to explicate
the ways in which householders collaboratively organize and conduct domestic life.
Through detailed attention to the nature of household routines, this line of research has
sought to and understand the barriers to technology adoption in the home [O'Brien et al.
1999], provide insight into what it means to design technologies that can be incorporated
into everyday life in the home [Tolmie et al. 2002], and highlight opportunities for a
richer type of domestic technology design that resonates with the demands of the home
[Crabtree and Rodden 2004; Rodden et al. 2004; Taylor and Swan 2005, Tolmie et al.
2007]. Another line of research has focused on the use of novel methods that suspend a
concern with rationality, functionality and utility to explore domestic values, often in
playful and provocative ways [Gaver et al. 1999; Gaver and Martin 2000; Hutchinson et
al. 2003; Boehner et al. 2007]. Given the centrality of communication within the home, a
number of systems have also been built and deployed in homes to explore new types of
technologies to support this. Some systems have explored the possibility to extend
explicit communications – for example, providing new mechanisms for holding
conversations [Hindus et al. 2001]. Another approach has focused on facilitating
communications by raising awareness of the whereabouts of family members [Brown et
al. 2007]. Instead of being designed for communication directly, this class of systems
helps householders take advantage of potential opportunities to communicate as needed.
Behind much of this research is the presence or assumed presence of a network
connection, both to connect the home to the digital world beyond the front door and to
connect to an increasing array of devices and services distributed around the home.
Network access is increasingly central to the computer’s domestic utility, so much so that
a great many households have expanded the network from a simple Internet connection
for a single computer, to an intra-household network that shares the network connection
across multiple machines and devices (such as Personal Video Recorders and dedicated
game consoles), and supports services within the home (such as networked music players
and home file servers. And it is the desire of householders to have networked applications
and services that drives commercial broadband and wireless service growth. And yet,
although the infrastructure underpinning intra-home networks holds much promise,
research already shows that the realization of the home network does not come without
complications.
2.4 Domestic Networking
Given existing interests in both communication and computing use in the home explosive
growth of the network during the early 1990s raised immediate questions about how

these would impact the household. As early as 1996 research was showing that domestic
networking was proving difficult. Franzke and McClard [1996] and Kiesler et al. [2000]
reported how difficult users found creating even the simplest network case: connecting
one computer to the Internet. Their findings stressed how participants needed technical
knowledge to avoid the trouble associated with diagnosing and dealing with networked
technologies. Over a decade on, two things have changed. First, the field of Ubiquitous
Computing has emerged with strong visions and an aggressive research agenda to build
‘smart homes’ and then leverage that intelligence to provide new classes of applications
to support domestic life [Kidd et al. 1999; Intille 2002]. Second, an increasing number of
homes have adopted more complex networks that connect a large numbers devices inside
the home together [Horrigan and Rainie 2002]. However, these two developments point
to a serious tension or gap [Shehan and Edwards 2007]: the promise of future
applications rests on the ability of householders to manage the home network, something
that our collective research shows has not become easier since the first reports of
connecting computers to the Internet.
We are not the first to comment on the complexity of technology demanded by the
Ubiquitous Computing agenda [Harper 2003]. In a seminal study of the Orange Smart
Home, Randall [2003] identifies that even in use, the smart home creates a paradoxical
situation for its residents. He learned that for the residents, albeit temporary ones in a
research setting, the control system designed to provide householders with increased
ability to manipulate the home was creating sufficient confusion as to leave them feeling
out of control. Others have focused on the work needed to understand what it means for
householders to be able to participate in or completely own the experience of making
their home smart. Edwards and Grinter [2001] observe that for most people, and unlike
most laboratory-built smart homes, making the home ‘smarter’ means adding
technologies to an existing structure, rather than commissioning a builder to design a
house that is smart from the ground up. This theme was further taken up by Rodden and
Benford [2003] who applied Stuart Brand’s [1994] architectural framework to analyse the
complex relationship that potentially exists between the structure of the home and the
technologies associated with domestic Ubiquitous Computing More recently, Beckmann
et al. [2004] focused on the complexity inherent in sensor networks designed to help
computers determine the presence and activity of users through an array of devices that
can detect movement, temperature, and so forth. They found, perhaps not unsurprisingly,
that people struggled to install these types of networks and questioned whether it was
appropriate to gather certain types of data in their homes at all.

The issue of network complexity, and how householders might come to manage it for
themselves – thereby embedding computing in, and adapting it to, the ongoing
circumstances of domestic life – is the principal concern of this paper. We begin by
noting that, despite the difficulties, households are taking up a networked domestic life.
Accordingly we seek to examine current practice surrounding the networked home and
learn from those practices what appropriate solutions to issues of complexity might be
concerned with. Our research shows not only the practices and routines that have
emerged around home networking, but also the ways in which home networking remains
non-trivial for even the most qualified of people – even those with advanced degrees in
Computer Science. The research sheds light on the Ubiquitous Computing agenda and the
real world character of ‘intelligence’ in the networked home, revealing what
householders are seeking to do with their home networks and how they are making them
‘fit into’ the infrastructures – technical, physical, and social – that inhabit the domestic
setting.
3 METHODS AND PARTICIPANTS
In this section we describe the methods we used to collect and analyse data, and the
participants from whom we collected that data. Our studies took two somewhat different
forms. In the United Kingdom (UK) our research took an ethnomethodologically-
informed ethnographic approach. In the United States (US) we employed a qualitative
approach using several different techniques to draw out the experiences of our
participants. We describe each of these in turn.
3.1 Methods and Participants in the United Kingdom
The study in the UK focused upon tracking over time the efforts of three different
households to install and maintain home networks. The study ran from May to December
2006 and involved a mixture of direct observations and ‘catch-up conversations’
designed to offer participants an opportunity to report on their ongoing experiences with
the network between observations. Both the ethnographic capture of data and subsequent
analysis were conducted from an ethnomethodological perspective [Suchman 1987],
which is to say that we sought to describe in fine detail the social organization of the
home network as it was given in the methodical ways that members encountered and
managed the network in the course of their day-to-day actions and interactions.
Participants in the study included:

• Household A, consisting of two adults, one male, one female, 44 and 30 years old
respectively, both computing professionals, living in a large two-bedroom
apartment.
• Household B, a family consisting of 2 adults, one male, one female, 38 and 36 years
old respectively, and 3 children, one 9 (a girl), one 7 (a boy), and one 15 months
(another girl), living in a semi-detached house; one of the adults is a computing
professional, all other members of the household have very limited technical
experience.
• Household C, a family consisting of 2 adults, one male, one female, both 43 years
old, and 2 children, one 12 (a girl) and one 9 (a boy), also living in a semi-detached
house; once again one of the adults is a computing professional but all of the others
in the household have no specialized experience of technology.
Whilst at least one member of each household was involved in computing in some
sense, none of the households involved in the study could really be described as having
‘advanced technology set ups’. Instead, as became quickly evident to us, each of the
computing professionals involved were very reluctant to get too heavily involved in
computing activities at home. The principal reason cited for this was that working with
computers already consumed a significant part of their day. Having someone technical in
the house does not, it would seem, by any means result in rapid technology adoption.
Rather, it transpired that any technical undertaking in the home was and is accountable to
a whole range of other everyday household concerns. The building of a home network
wasn’t driven by technical interest then, but was instead motivated by household
members’ concern to develop a solution to burgeoning technological complexity:
multiple computers, multiple devices, and multiple demands being placed on them by
various household members warranted and drove the construction of home networks for
the participants in our study. With broadband connections amounting to over 70% of all
Internet connections in the UK and a rapid uptake of wireless technologies, it is hard to
maintain the notion of home network building being about experimentation done by
‘geeks’. Instead people are installing home networks because it makes sense for them to
do so in the face of computing technology that is increasingly distributed throughout the
home and used by a variety of equally distributed different household members.
Construction of a home network is a members’ solution to the problem of distribution.
Our study of network construction and maintenance was conducted through monthly
site visits, which were complemented by regular catch-up conversations over the
telephone. The site visits were a critical part of being able to witness and understand the
reasoning involved in a range of situated activities associated with building and

maintaining the networks. However, as is apparent in the following sections, it transpired
that network set-up and maintenance rapidly becomes an ongoing and routine feature of
the broader pattern of household activities. We therefore kept in regular contact with the
households in order to capture some of what that ongoing work involved as part of the
participants’ day-to-day experience. The site visits were conducted through direct
ethnographic or participant observation [Crabtree 2003]. This entailed shadowing
participants as they went about their activities in order to produce a fine-grained or ‘thick
description’ [Ryle 1971] of the actions and interactions involved in setting up and
maintaining their home networks. The aim of the approach was and is to uncover and
explicate the various ordinary, in situ, and frequently tacit competences and collaborative
activities through which everyday courses of action (such as network maintenance) are
accomplished and organized. Data capture here is comprehensive as there is no prior
presumption as to what might or might not be significant. Instead the ethnographer aims
to become party to the gamut of lively action and reasoning applied to situated
circumstances as they arise. In this way matters such as network set-up and maintenance
are seen as a practical accomplishments done by social actors performing their activities
in the face of a host of local contingencies that inhabit their work [Garfinkel 1967].
The record of practice that emerges is similarly subject to ethnomethodological
analysis where the focus is upon what can be learnt about recurrent patterns of action and
reasoning through the inspection of particular ‘instances’ [Sacks 1984] in which the
members of particular settings engage with and display their orientation to the ongoing
and organized work of those settings [Button 1992]. Thus, whilst findings may be
articulated through specific fieldwork vignettes, it should not be understood that what is
being said is only of relevance to the particulars of each observed instance. Instead we are
interested in broad characteristics of practical action and practical reasoning that make
‘homes’, ‘households’, ‘housework’, ‘network maintenance’, etc., recognizable as the
organized accomplishments of members – that is, as accomplishments that you or I as
well as those studied might recognize as organized accomplishments too. Thus, as people
engage with concerns such as where to put technology, where to plug things in, how to
organize furniture, what to tell children about using things, and so on, we are interested in
both how the particular arrangements and characteristics shape how technology is ‘made
at home’ in some particular setting, and how the social organization of practical action
and practical reasoning is of broader relevance to our understanding of home networks
and the potential for their continued development.

3.2 Methods and Participants in the United States
In the United States we conducted two studies that followed the same protocol. The
protocol consisted of two steps. First, we asked potential participants to fill out an
inventory of their technology. The inventory was organized into three parts. Part one
focused on technologies, in particular infrastructure technologies such as home control,
security, cable, satellite systems, and network type (e.g., WiFi, Ethernet). Part two asked
the participants to locate technologies in each room of their house. Part three focused on
those technologies that do not tend to be associated with a specific room, but rather with
a particular householder. The goal of this inventory was to get a sense of the technologies
that we were likely to encounter during the interview and to customize our interview for
that particular household.
The second step of our home protocol consisted of a home visit, which was scheduled
for a time when all members of the household would be present and available. This was
limited to all ‘typically occupant’ householders – we did not attempt to schedule times
when sons and daughters would be home from university or military service for example.
The home visit itself was broken into three distinct parts. First, we asked our participants
to each independently sketch their current Audio-Visual (AV) and Computer networks,
and then draw what they thought they would ideally like. The current network sketching
exercise allowed us to understand what individual participants thought their network
comprised (and from this we were able to identify differences among householders). By
asking about their ideal was to see what people aspired to, particularly where it differed
from visions that we might hold in HCI or Ubicomp research. It also turned out that the
sketches also served as a useful tool for ‘warming up’ the participants: being forced to
think explicitly about their network helped them to reconnect to sometimes ‘invisible’
infrastructure technologies [Star 1999; Tolmie et al. 2002]. After sketching we asked the
participants to take us on a guided tour of their home, to visit the locations where they
had home networking or AV equipment. We included AV networks in this study for two
reasons. First, AV represents a predecessor network in the home, meaning that such
networks represent, for most people, an earlier instantiation of a complex constellation of
interconnected devices. We anticipated that AV networks might have some influence in
how people handled their computer networks. Second, AV and computer networks are
increasingly converging with devices requiring the services of both (i.e., a MP3 player
that gets content from the computer but plays it out through the speakers of the stereo).
At each location we visited in the home, we asked the householders to describe what was
going on, and prompted them to talk about their network. Again, we found proximity to

some of the devices triggered memories about victories and disasters associated with
networking. When the home tour was complete, we returned with the participants to the
living room to finish asking questions.
We recruited participants in two metropolitan areas of the United States: San
Francisco and Atlanta. In San Francisco our sample consisted of 8 households that were
made up of two people (a man and woman) with dual-incomes and no-children. Our
sample in this city intentionally focused on early adopter home network users, with
complex network needs and configurations, in order to reveal both possible futures for
home networking, and to understand how relatively expert users approach the challenges
of networking in the home. Thus, these couples all had at least one householder with
some formal or practical knowledge of networking, which took the form of an advanced
degree in Computer Science, or many years of systems administration experience. In
Atlanta, our sample consisted of 11 households, with a total of 28 individual participants.
We sampled to broaden the types of household we visited beyond simply early adopters.
Six of the households we visited included parents and children. Despite broadening our
sample, all of our participants had higher than average household incomes (pointing to
the costs of home networking, and of the reality of a “smart home”). More details about
the participants and the methods are available in our earlier reports of these studies
[Grinter et al. 2005; Chetty et al. 2007].
4 RESULTS: CONSIDERING THE NETWORK FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT
In this section we present the results of our collective research organised into two
sections that broadly reflect the work of ‘digital housekeeping’ [Tolmie et al. 2007]. First
we wish to reflect on the work required to introduce new devices and services into the
home and to make them fit into the network and the household. Second, we talk about the
ongoing work required to keep the devices and services working once they have been
configured. In both sections, we wish to stress two interrelated types of work, the work to
understand and work with the network as a technical artefact, and simultaneously the
need to manage it as a social artefact.
4.1 Setting Up Technology in the Home
A common theme that emerges across our research in both the UK and USA is the
complexities that households face in setting up their technology at home and making it
part of their home network. This complexity manifested itself in positioning the
technology, maintaining the wider order of the home, and planning for change. We
describe each of these in turn.

Many, if not all, of the households we visited discussed issues of locating technology
in the home – i.e., where they installed the devices that made up their home networks and
why they chose particular places. In these conversations, a number of properties that
home networks must fulfil came to light. Some stemmed from the physical and
infrastructural properties of the house itself, while others spoke to the domestic order of
the household, family members’ patterns of action and interaction with each other, and
quotidian ‘logics’ that organise the home and the work within it. The physical properties
of the house required that householders reason about the network in a variety of ways.
The presence of wireless networks, marketed in part to work around the constraints of the
physical house, did not always mean that our participants did not have to think about their
home. For example, participants described learning about the physical properties of their
homes, such as the thickness of the walls, through their experiences of locating their
wireless base station(s) within their home. Householders told us about the reach of their
wireless networks, the strength of the signal, and the places where parts of their home
hidden behind their walls (load bearing walls being attributed as being particularly thick)
blocked or reduced their network connectivity. Wireless networks – both those belonging
to the household, as well as those belonging to neighbours – appeared at various places in
the physical environment of our participants’ homes. Some families talked about not only
where they could and could not connect to their own network, but also where they saw
someone else’s signal. Indeed, we saw evidence in the form of repositioned furniture to
capitalise on ‘free network access’ in parts of the home that their own household wireless
networks did not cover.
The need for power was a significant constraint on device location. Devices had to be
situated by the wall jack, or power had to be “moved” to where householders wanted the
technology. In older houses (where power outlets were less common), literally fulfilling
the need for power required the development of complex schemes including plugging
multiple extension cords into each other (forming a chain) in order to cope with a
situation where there was a jack with at most two outlets serving between six and ten
devices competing for power. In some cases infrequently used devices might be
disconnected, but many components (e.g., the television, the router) either occupied such
a central role that they had to be constantly plugged in. Participants recognised that the
overloading of wall jacks with chains of extension cords was hardly the safest solution.
As we discuss below, the presence of young children can make this type of arrangement
unacceptable. Another problem we found with this solution was that the circuitry could
not meet the power demands of the devices, leading to other difficulties. In one case, it

took the householders several months of living with a problem before they figured out
that when they turned on certain combinations of devices, their circuit would fail to
provide enough power (brown-out), which in turn caused their router to lose its IP
address thus disabling the network. After they finally determined the problem with their
router, this put the household into the position of having to redesign their network to
accommodate their electrical wiring.
Despite the obvious need to connect devices to a power supply, extension cords also
served another purpose, to move devices so that they were positioned in the places that
householders wanted. In these cases, we learned about locations that were grounded in
our shared sense of where certain activities should happen. Discussions about the shape
of the room, the possibilities of arranging furniture, and most importantly expectations
about what types of activities took place where (which orientation, with access to what
lighting, because the furniture would not fit any other way, because it was important to
have access to other parts of the home, etc.) led our householders to arrange their rooms
and in so doing configure their activities in particular ways. They then worked hard to
ensure that devices could be connected into that space in ways that fitted into that usage
plan.
Another type of consideration that emerged in our households focused on children,
who often surfaced a set of logics concerned with physical safety of both children and
household devices. Households confronted the challenges posed by children by putting
devices in places where they could not be reached, and making sure that wires were
installed in such a way that they would not be tripped over. Decoration also mattered in
the sense that tidiness and appropriate visibility/invisibility came up for our householders.
We found cases of DSL modems being hidden under couches, because householders did
not like to see the blinking lights in their living rooms. We saw ‘nests’ of wires behind
the backs of televisions and other large devices in order to hide them from view. In one
instance, having abandoned an attempt to hide these wires, one family had decided
instead to decorate them, as if to acknowledge their presence and attempt to integrate
them more aesthetically into the home. In another case potentially unsightly nests of
cables were placed on a windowsill where pre-existing clutter would render them
relatively invisible, stressing that invisibility for householders is often not about literal
absence of perceptual availability but rather a matter of making features wholly
commonplace [Tolmie et al. 2002].
These ecological placements – which are rooted in the household’s desire to have
their network reflect their household order – turned on not just the power needs of

devices but also on data requirements. Wireless networks provided some flexibility in
this regard, but we also encountered other types of networks in use in order to allow data
to reach a device. Both phoneline and powerline bridges, technologies that use the
existing home phone and electrical wiring infrastructure, respectively, to pass data traffic,
were present in some of the homes we visited. Participants explained that these
technologies allowed the home network to evolve in ways that supported how they used
their physical space.
Related to the work of positioning particular network elements, we also heard about
the work of making changes while retaining wider order during installation. Installing a
single device, or making more complex changes and/or enhancements to the network, we
learned, was typically a complex activity involving disruption to the household. In most
but not all households, we saw that this activity tended to fall to one individual –
typically a person with some type of formal knowledge (either acquired through formal
education in Computer Science and related disciplines and/or through professional
experience of holding jobs that entailed some level of computing competence) took up
the responsibility associated with making changes to the network. The fact that this
pattern repeated itself across the homes in our collective studies immediately suggests
one challenge for Ubiquitous Computing and related disciplines, the necessity of not
requiring such specialized knowledge in order to set up, maintain and evolve home
networks. This is particularly important if Ubiquitous Computing is to reach out to
broader sections of the population.
The person responsible for these changes often described undertaking two kinds of
related activities. First, the person thought about the addition of new technology, or the
reconfiguration of the network, in its technical terms. By this, we mean that part of this
job was to consider the entire network, and its topology, to make sure that the undertaken
change not only provided the desired goal but also did not break existing services. For
many of our householders this goal turned out to be surprisingly hard. Just knowing what
services the network was providing was sometimes more complicated than it might
appear. For example, households with teenagers – who reported making their own
changes and modifications to the network – sometimes did not have a unified knowledge
of what was on their network or the services it provided (and where it delivered those
applications). In other cases, we heard about seldom-used services, easily forgotten when
making changes, and discovered only after the change had been made.
This set of considerations was closely coupled to a broader, out of network, set of
plans that also needed to be made. Additions and changes were often described as being

very disruptive. The physical mess associated with the technology was often ungainly,
cluttering up space around the network. But this was not the only problem that these
householders considered: they also described thinking about the network as a collection
of services embedded in the broader routines of the home. Changes to the network
frequently meant disruption to those routines. Additions of print servers might mean that
printers would be offline; re-cabling an audio-visual network to include a Personal Video
Recorder or iPod would mean that others could not watch television or use the receiver.
For all these reasons, making changes to the network was frequently described in
terms that emphasized not only the modifications, but also the means by which order
within the network and the home would be preserved. These changes were also
sometimes framed in terms that highlighted the anxiety and apprehension about the
complexities of maintaining order while making change. In fact, one family who had
been trying to resolve a problem on their network described how it had been on their to-
do list, in one form or another (referring to the different solutions that they had tried) for
over 3 months, and because of that they saw any new change as one of great risk. One
solution that some home administrators used was to minimize the disruption caused by
change by waiting for an appropriate time such as when other householders were not
present. In a more ambitious case, when a household had decided to install an Ethernet-
based network, they waited until their home was undergoing renovations to make the
change, leveraging a more intense change to the physical structure of the home as an
opportunity to make this more minor modification.
In addition to making decisions about the location of devices, and thinking about how
to make changes while maintaining order, other planning activities also took place. This
planning work had two foci, first, the technical work of making the network work an,
second, making the system fit into the domestic order of the household. The technical
network focus manifested itself in at least two ways. First, we were amazed, particularly
in households that had elaborate home networks (multiple machines and subnets, wired
and wireless, powerline and phoneline, connections to one or more corporate network and
so forth), by the sheer amount of equipment that was not in the network currently but on
hand for supporting changes and upgrades. We found cupboards and chests of drawers
devoted to wires and other network devices such as routers, servers, and hubs. When we
asked why these householders had so many different types of cables and devices, we
learned that their sense of change was that it was likely to be complicated enough to
require specialized cabling, so they planned for needing it and kept it to hand. Indeed, it
appeared to be analogous to not starting a home renovation project without all the

appropriate equipment (a need to have all the “parts” so that the job could be finished in a
timely manner).
Another way that network planning manifested itself was through the maintenance of
homemade network diagrams (not to be confused with the ones that we asked the
participants in the US studies to sketch in the course of our study). These diagrams
reflected our participants’ need to track what was on the network and how it was
connected together. Some of the labels communicated the role that the device was serving,
for example, whether it was just passing traffic or whether it was configured for Network
Address Translation (NAT) and so forth. Others parts of the diagram communicated
whether firewalls were present (even if they were in software and not in hardware) and
sometimes listed the ports that were live. All of this served to help those householders in
the work of planning change to the network (and again suggest the current level of
complexity that home networking requires on the part of the household).
The diagrams also spoke to the second focus of planning, understanding how the
network fitted into the domestic order. Devices, most notably computers, were given
labels that also spoke to who tended to use them. Jan’s computer, for example, implicated
a particular member of the household in any intended change that involved or affected
that machine. The diagrams also served as a resource for understanding change within the
context of the household itself. This concern – how change would affect the household –
also manifested itself in household discussions about what constituted appropriate
changes to the network and for what reasons. For example, most households with
children talked about the plans that they had made to acquire new technology to support
their children’s educational needs. Other households talked to us about their differing
views on network changes based on whether they thought it was appropriate to undertake
computer-related activities in certain rooms in the home. Planning involved discussions
about financial realities of the household, aesthetic considerations, and whether the new
addition would provide services that were appropriate in context of device placement,
and the routines of action and interaction within various rooms of the home.
In summary, throughout the broader ‘setting up’ activity we saw a constant attention
to what we describe as within and without network concerns. The technical within
network focus manifested itself in resolving technical constraints, in leveraging creative
solutions to appropriate device placement, in thinking about how to preserve the technical
functionality of the system while making changes, and in leveraging a variety of
resources (cabling, networking equipment, diagrams) to ensure that changes to the
network were successful. The broader without focus on the household order was apparent

in and articulated through local logics of device placement based on routines, in
householders’ respect for those routines in planned disruptions, and in keeping track of
who might be affected in updates.
4.2 Housekeeping of Digital Resources
Beyond the setting up of devices, we saw another kind of digital housekeeping associated
with the smooth running of everyday network services for householders. Within this we
saw that some routine management tasks require much more consideration in the
domestic setting, that householders have to take up questions of access and security, and
that digital media management presents a new challenge for the home.
Just as in office settings, our visits and interviews revealed that householders confront
a range of routine network management tasks such as backups and systems upgrades.
However, unlike the office setting where backups, systems patches and updates may
happen automatically as a result of connecting to the corporate network (and taking
advantage of the managed infrastructure typically available there), we did not see any
evidence of such systematic automation at home. Instead, householders tended to do this
work explicitly, when they decided to do it at all. Again, this work, like that of set up also
reflected the dual foci on the network itself as a technical entity and on the relationship
between the network and the household. This work, the housekeeping of digital resources,
also highlighted the tight interconnection between the technical and domestic work
associated with home networking.
In most households, backup was also largely the responsibility of a single individual.
This householder tended to think more about the consequences of backing up, and
understood the technical intricacies of what it meant to lose data and attempt to restore a
machine and its files. Other householders might participate in backup-related activities,
such as emailing copies of important files to themselves, but they were not nearly as
involved in this work. For the person who did consider, and sometimes implement
backup schemes, their knowledge by necessity included some understanding of what the
others might have done, and their machine usage patterns. While the former was used to
support them in their decisions about when to back up, the latter helped them to know
where files were likely to be stored (particularly if there were central and local options)
as well as finding a good time to do this type of work since it would likely preclude the
person from using that device/files during that time.
We also learned that in some households, another set of technical and household
concerns got bound together in ways that complicated and even confused assignment of
responsibility for certain support tasks. In particular, in some households we learned

about a strong distinction made between device support activities and network support
activities. This distinction turned on a sense among the household that devices (especially
computers) were considered to be owned by a member of the household. In these cases,
we also saw the device ownership in use was coupled with device ownership in
maintenance. The person who used the computer was expected to be able to do
maintenance, despite the different levels of knowledge and ability to perform such tasks.
In these cases, we also learned about tension among householders with some feeling that
they had responsibility for things they couldn’t and didn’t want to do, while others felt
the need to refuse to take on more work to make the home network work.
The dual questions of access and security also came up in terms of managing the
digital resources that comprised the home network. Households with children exhibited
some of the most explicit questions about access and security, and some solutions that
used a variety of technical and social methods appeared to strike the right balance
between access and security. Adults in our studies spent time and energy deciding how to
balance their children’s use of the Internet (and the resources that it made available for
learning and recreation) against the uncertainties and threats that use of the Internet may
pose. Some families installed specialized software, seeking a technical solution to the
problem of security. But these solutions in turn ask families to explicitly state what is
permitted and what is not, something that outside of the context of actual exploration and
practice can be hard to know definitively. Worse still, these solutions tend to reify a
standard (sites allowed, sites not allowed) set of expectations as if all households will
respond to the same sites in the same ways, something that our households reported they
did not align themselves with in all cases.
Alongside technical means for managing access and security, our families also
developed strategies that leveraged other properties of the network, most notably its
hardware and location, within the broader home. For example, one family determined
that their children could use the network but only in ‘public places’ within the home such
as the kitchen or dining room, but not the bedroom. These householders simply
disconnected the bedroom computer from the network and then allowed their children to
use it. A number of families had a public space like kitchen devoted to an Internet-
connected computer, which was often used by children for homework while cooking took
place, allowing parents to supervise their children’s online computer use. These
computers were positioned in such a way that adults in the kitchen had a ‘good view’ of
the monitor in use by their children. Security then was accomplished by using their

knowledge of their own routines within the home marrying adults’ activities to the rules
that governed children’s Internet usage.
Access and security questions also came up with respect to wireless networks, and we
observed both technical and social resources being used to manage the use of such
networks. In almost every house, at least one householder was aware of the technical
insecurity of most consumer wireless protocols (such as WEP), but still used these
solutions because of the difficulty of using more secure systems (such as EAP-TLS).
Other households coupled these Wi-Fi based security protocols with other network
architectural decisions that increased network security, such as using NAT to ensure that
inbound attacks could not easily access the internal network devices, and also enabling
MAC address filtering, so that only certain machines could use the network. Other people
left their networks open. Some people sought to invite ‘good use’ by their neighbours,
which meant that they did not mind if other people used their network as long as they
didn’t then engage in bandwidth intensive activities. In this mode, offenders would
receive a physical visit from a member of the householder and be asked to refrain from
downloading such bandwidth heavy material. Householders used social expectations
about what constituted appropriate activity to manage this kind of access. Other people,
despite having left their networks open, did not appear to invite their neighbours to access
it. Indeed, in one case, where a household lived on a large plot of land, the householders
determined that their wireless network did not exceed their property boundaries and
consequently they decided that no one would be likely to trespass and use their network.
A final irony was that in considering access and security, some of our households
exhibited a rather inconsistent policy. A few households took technical security
mechanisms to lock down their own wireless network, while simultaneously feeling little
remorse if they ever used their neighbours’ insecure networks. A few people even
admitted to looking into their neighbour’s networks, identifying devices and even
opening files. But these same people spoke about a dilemma, while they wanted to tell
their neighbours that they were insecure, householders valued being able to use that
network, particularly when their own was down.
A final area that produced a variety of housekeeping tasks focused on the management of
digital media. A common recurring theme in our studies was the complexity of managing
the ever-increasing volume of digital media including digital images, music, and movies.
Housekeeping around digital media often seemed to come up in conversation as being
deeply unsatisfying for householders, a case of ‘doing the best possible’ in circumstances
that were both technically and socially complicated. For example, one question that

plagued our households was where to store digital images. Images taken off cameras
often ended up on the hard drive associated with the machine to which they had been
downloaded; much less frequently did we find images on a central machine that acted as
a unified file store (in part, we think, because the notion of local versus central file shares
seemed to be an abstract concept for some householders, one grounded in a technical
understanding of networking that was not familiar or easy for some of our householders
to understand). However, that led to situations where media was strewn around the
individual machines of the household, making joint or household collections difficult to
easily construct.
Music highlighted how this tension between individuality and collectivism was even
designed into devices. For example, we found several households who had integrated an
iPod into their AV network, so that they could play digital music through their home
stereo system. However, iPods can only be associated with one computer at a time,
meaning that the person who had the iPod controlled which music was playable at home
via the AV network. The householders whose music was not stored on the iPod typically
commented on the difficulties of not being able to play their preferred choices. More
generally, we suggest that the increased emphasis on digital media is not well coupled to
solutions for managing those files.
Day to day digital housekeeping– i.e., the work of supporting the network and its
resources – reveals how the technical and social concerns of domestic networking are
tightly integrated. Householders engaged in a variety of technical strategies for managing
back ups, some that would be familiar as back up even to computing professionals, and
others that supported critical file recovery. At the same time, back ups also required
understanding the patterns of use that householders engaged in on the network. Access
and security illustrates how householders used technical and social solutions, sometimes
in concert, to manage their resources while securing themselves from perceived threats.
Simultaneously, we learned about some householders who could ‘read’ and exploit the
potential gaps in others’ inability to manipulate access and security. Finally, digital media
seemed to present a myriad of difficulties associated with making collective use of
resources that by their very design are intended for individual use. Simply put, domestic
digital housekeeping consists of working with not only the technical artefacts of the
network, but also the social routines of action and interaction, in order to find working
solutions to making the network at home on a day-to-day basis.
5. DISCUSSION

While the promise of homes populated by a heterogeneous collection of computational
devices offering a range of “smart” services continues to motivate research and product
development, the networking on which those visions rely remains neglected. Yet whether
motivated by visions of ‘smartness’ or by more mundane concerns with technical
complexity, households are beginning to assemble their own collection of devices and
services in their homes. Our research argues that we need to examine what households
are constructing and how they provide for the ongoing configuration and maintenance of
the home network in order that we might better understand and respond to the real world
challenges involved in making the home network into a routine feature of domestic life.
Collectively our research begins to address this by examining home networks as they
exist and by learning from householders about the rationale that guides their initial set up
and ongoing maintenance activities. Critically, we have found that constructing and
maintaining the home network relies two types of closely interlinked work. First, there is
the technical work required to understand the network as a technical artefact, and with
that knowledge make the technical changes required to preserve, enhance and evolve the
infrastructure and services that it offers. Second, there is the work to understand how the
network supports the households’ routines.
Our studies show that the work required to implement home networking presents
significant challenges. Some of these stem from the fact that networking technologies
were designed for an entirely different context of use than the home. The Advanced
Research Project Agency’s original internetwork (the ARPAnet) led to the protocols and
standards that define how traffic moves from computer to computer, and in turn provide
support for services such as email and the World-Wide Web which in turn delivered end-
user applications such as online banking, and the sharing of images and videos via Flickr
and YouTube (etc.). These core networking technologies originated in the context of a
military-governmental system that was designed with redundancy as one of its core
design objectives [Abbate 1999; King et al, 1997]. From its origins in providing access to
expensive servers for processing data, and for ensuring that traffic could pass from end-
to-end, even if some machines were not available for message passing, we have ended up
with a collection of technologies that now find themselves in the home (after having
migrated into commercial organisations, who like the military solved the problems of
technical know-how by hiring specialised staff).
These original design objective of redundancy (and the technical innovations it
fostered) have now come home, at least for now seemingly ruling out other possible
objectives such as ease of use, maintenance, installation and evolution. Some have argued

that the core technical assumptions of the Internet are directly a cause of networking
problems for non-professional users [Shehan and Edwards 2007; Blumenthal and Clark
2001]. Further, this core set of technologies has become a legacy system, what is in the
home now is there because these protocols and standards dominated and ultimately beat
out their competitors, creating an internal inertia that mitigates against new – potentially
more easily usable and adaptable – technologies replacing them [Rosenberg 1982].
One significant implication of this legacy, which is highlighted throughout our
research, focuses on the differences in the knowledge of householders in our study
compared to the knowledge assumed to be required for network management by the
designers of the Internet. The design context for the early Internet was one in which
systems and networks were assumed to be ‘owned’ by trained systems administrators,
who supported the network for use by many hundreds if not thousands of people. Our
research shows that for many householders, managing networks based on this same set of
rationales and core Internet technologies presents serious challenges and time
commitments in order to make the home network work. These time commitments include
the work that householders do to make decisions about how to technically set up the
network, position devices, configure security to balance the maintenance of access,
decide how best to support backups, and so forth. In addition to having to implement
these decisions in the network, our householders also took on a challenge that comes
from the physical infrastructure of the house itself – a building not yet designed to
support network infrastructure. In the case of device placement, features of the house
itself, like the wall jacks and load bearing walls, influence the ways in which it is
technically possible to set up the network and its devices. Indeed, in some households we
saw that the problems associated with the house led to the adoption and use of other types
of technologies intended to work around the difficulty of not having networking
proximate to the devices. To make networking work, sometimes householders engineered
very complex technical solutions.
This technical work is also intertwined with another type of work needed to make the
home network work: something we have previously described as digital housekeeping
[Tolmie, et al. 2007]. This is the work of fitting the network into a household’s routines.
We have described how the network needs to accommodate the routines of each
household, such as having devices positioned in places that make sense in broader terms
of who uses the room (children supervised by their parents, adults only) what the space is
used for (watching television, surfing the web) and the configuration of furniture therein.
We want to stress here that these routines belong to the household, and do not always

transfer from one home to another. For example, we found a few households with
occupants who had very strong views about the appropriateness of television in the living
room. When framed in terms of statistics, the adoption of television has been profound,
appearing in almost every home. Yet we saw differences, and very strongly held
positions, on where television (and indeed the computer) could live in the home, and
households differed in their decisions. It is, then, important to appreciate the flexibility
and evolution of household routines and respect this when developing alternate solutions;
indeed designing for flexibility and evolution would seem to be key.
When designing for the routine, the network must be made to reflect the practical
concerns of the home. We saw this manifest itself in a sense that the network should be
made ‘presentable’ so that it fits in to the home. Some families put their networked
devices; particularly those that people did not interact with directly like modems and base
stations, in surprising places. We found at least one modem under a couch, and found a
wireless repeater worked into a flower arrangement. Minimally, we suggest that this
argues for making not just the end-user technologies aesthetically pleasing, but also for
giving thought to the potential to disguise or camouflage the other devices in the network
so that they can be “hidden” in plain view. Beyond this simple design suggestion, our
emphasis is on highlighting that being tidy matters to households, and the network must
reflect these concerns.
A third aspect of the work that householders take on when they adopt and use
networking technologies is making the network accountable to the domestic order that
exists in the home. This manifests itself very visibly in planning for change. We learned
about the strategies that our households have for trying to minimize disruption when the
network is about to under go change, including waiting until people were not going to
need the resources provided by the network, and in some cases, laying in supplies of
cables and other equipment so that when projects started they would end as quickly as
possible. Whatever strategy our householders used, their sensitivity to understanding the
routine engagements of other people with the network was an integral part of planning
any change. A fourth type of consideration that householders factored in, particularly
with respect to the ongoing maintenance of the network, was balancing the time
dedicated to network work against all of the other time commitments that existed within
their home. In addition to making decisions about when and how often to do various
types of network-related work, the household also had to decide when was an appropriate
time to respond to something going on with the network, in much the same way that
householders have to decide whether or not to answer a phone during meal-time.

Underpinning this discussion of the technical and socially organized work involved in
making the network at home is a sense that householders are constructing unique
networks. In the technical sense, we found very different architectures in the households
that we visited. For example, we found some households with networks that consisted of
multiple sub-networks, while others did not make such distinction, instead connecting all
devices onto the same network link. We also saw differences in the types of machines
connected, the level of integration of the computer and A/V networks that many
households had, and the types of services that the home network provided. These
technical differences reflected important social differences among the households that we
visited. The households varied in a number of important ways such as number of rooms,
division of routine across those rooms, overall house size, number of occupants, the
relationships among the occupants, and the types of infrastructure coming into the home
that would support a home network. All of these in turn became reflected in the network
itself, such as decisions about what device would be where, used by whom, when, and so
forth.
This degree of variability has, we suggest, been under-examined, but presents a
significant challenge for deploying the applications that are posited for the digital
environment of our future homes. The degree of variability presents a challenge because
it reflects households as a local social order. Variability in the network reflects how each
household uniquely decides and enacts an order that makes their concerns, their
aspirations, the ideas about what it means to live together make sense and seem
appropriate. Home networking, we suggest, has to accommodate these differences,
indeed its success relies upon it being answerable to the local social order at work in any
home. Another observation is that this local understanding makes at least one possible
trajectory for home networking – that of outsourcing it to an outside company –
complicated at best. Indeed, our householders described how people coming into their
home to set up new devices would follow a set script for installation, assuming that their
network was a generic entity. As soon as the installer left, the householders would then
disassemble the device and connection and rebuild it so that it was actually compatible
with their network. This local understanding and the need to make the network fit into
this home also suggests the need for sophisticated types of home network management
tools that work with people’s technical needs and skills, and which make the ways in
which they configure, use and maintain the network accountable and thus available to
practical reasoning.

A final theme that binds the technical and social together is that of financing. In the
US households we visited, we asked for estimates of the number of bills paid for the
network, and in some cases we even learned about the rough monthly totals for the
network. All of those on-going costs, and all the costs associated with purchasing devices
(bar those that are provided by the corporations that our householders worked for) are
born by the household itself. A consideration of financial costs also factored into what
services the network was tasked to provide, such as whether a service, or a new a device,
made sense for the household. Consideration of the financial implications of home
networking, and domestic computing more generally, has also not received as much
attention from the HCI community as they merit. We suggest that domestic computing
and the domestic HCI agenda cannot avoid the consideration of the price-performance
that applications provide, because very clearly householders do not ignore it; instead they
bring it into their conversations about what is necessary and what might be deferred or
simply rejected.

6. CONCLUSIONS
We have presented the results of studies of home networking that took place in the
United Kingdom and the United States. The focus of these studies was on understanding
how householders are incorporating networking technologies and the services that they
provide into their homes. The studies suggest that understanding domestic networking
involves examining the complexities of the technical and the social work that must be
accomplished for the network to fit into the home. Domestic home networking offers
numerous opportunities for Human-Computer Interaction. Clearly, one take away from
this research is that great potential exists for innovation in applications and interfaces that
help householders with home networking. Today’s situation suggests that adoption and
use of home networks largely relies on the technological skill of one household member,
which would seem to support current approaches to delivering networks to the home.
However, studies of domestic networking offer a new lens through which to examine
what it means for people to participate in and belong to the networked home. While set-
up and maintenance may be largely fall to one individual in the home, the network itself
reflects a host of quotidian concerns that occupy household members as individuals-in-a-
collective. Understanding how those concerns are reflected in the ongoing set-up and
maintenance of the home network opens up the design space for developing the home of
the future.

We would suggest that the emergence of the domestic networking may require a more
radical reconsideration of the network. Our studies offer significant evidence of the way
in which the network is shaped by the localised needs and desires of the home. This
included the physical setting of the home, the routines of the home and the everyday
activities that take place. However, the Internet has not been driven by these localised
needs rather it has been driven by issues of scale and complexity where the network
explicitly does not embody any notion of anticipated or expected use. This is an issue that
require deep engagement by HCI and is much more than providing user-friendly interface
to an infrastructure that does not reflect the nature of the home. Rather, we need to
redress this schism by consider how we might reinvent the network infrastructure itself
from a user driven perspective where usability plays a central role in reconsidering and
reshaping the design decisions at the core of the network.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank all the people who took part in this research. We acknowledge
the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the
National Science Foundation (NSF).

STATEMENT OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS AND PREVIOUS WORK
This paper differs from the previous work in three ways.

First, and foremost this paper is a synthesis of independent research projects. Bringing these projects together
we have been able to merge the data and with that show how the technical challenges interact with the social
challenges of making the network work.

Second, we have extended several sections of the paper. New data is reported in our results section, and a new
discussion only possible from the union of the studies is presented.

Third, we have extended the related work. This section reports new related work, but also goes into depth and
detail not reported in any of the previous research write-ups.

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