Context Special: Not just Task, but Room Temperature

Jennifer Rode has just left Britain behind after more two years of English everyday life to return to America. She says that her paper "Appliances for Whom? Considering Place", written at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and presented at 3AD (see UN story: A Shift of Focus to Context), was inspired in part by the experience of immersion in the two cultures and having the differences between them emerge in unexpected ways.

As noted, the 3AD conference had turned its attention from product design issues to a greater consideration of the social or organisational context in which the designs are used. With a paper that devoted its whole theme to the differences between contexts of use across different cultures, Rode considered the home as represented in American product design and the limitations of this idea of one model for all.

Citing research she participated in while still based in England, she told of basic differences in how households operate between the two countries that stopped a breadmaker in its tracks. Bread makes overnight in the USA because rooms are kept warm at night. In the UK, the ambient temperature at night, when heating is turned down or off, is too low to activate the yeast. So, even these two cultures perceived to be close in their digital design needs are widely different when domestic products are considered.

Moving from temperature, she looked at the space assumptions that inform the design of vacuum cleaner robots – that there will be big rooms with widely-spread furniture – and wireless networks – that houses are usually detached and in their own grounds. Again, Britain's density made a good contrast, where small rooms, terraced houses and multiple flats foiled designers' intentions. In the case of wireless networks, data security issues about networks which spread outside one household's domain are made apparent in a way that is unlikely to happen in North America.

Rode went on to look at average number of people per dwelling, number of rooms per household, and number of rooms per person for a good cross section of the world and finds the USA at the spacious end of all the graphs.

'Rather than looking at homes in general, we should look more carefully at the culturally specific features of the home,' she argued. 'We should include statistical data on infrastructure, family structure and house size when publishing our work to make our data more understandable and transferable.'

When challenged that it was only the wealthy in other parts of the world that could afford luxury goods of the kind being described and that their homes shared characteristics, Rode was unmoved. In addition to tackling the basis of the assertion, she drew attention to the other factors that distinguish homes in many parts of the world, such as weather conditions and power cuts that affect wealthy and poor alike.

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