Abstract
We discuss homes as potential settings for the products of appliance design. We catalog the large international and regional differences. We look at differences in terms of infrastructure: heating, plumbing, electricity, and telephony. We examine differences in the home itself in terms of number of household members, and size of dwelling. We explore the implications of this variation for future ethnographies as well as product creation as we ask the question “appliances for whom?”
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Notes
Comparable statistics are not included in the US census, as it breaks heating us down by fuel type rather than central heat or room-by-room heating. 96.89% of the US heat their home with utility gas, bottled, tank or LP gas, electricity, or some sort of fuel oil, with 0.84 not heating their homes (and therefore not having central heat) [22]. 70% of these are in western states. Of the remainder 61% of Hawaii is additionally unheated [3]
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Acknowledgements
Sincerest thanks to Blaine Price and Jonathan Hardwick for their hours of explaining infrastructure differences when I first arrived in the UK. I would like to thank Paul Dourish for his comments on this draft, as well as Charlotte Lee and Sameer Patil for their assistance. I would like to credit Genevieve Bell as her talk “Cultural Perspectives on Urban Asia” inspired this work, and thank her for pointing me towards various statistics. Eleanor F. Toye, Alan F. Blackwell and Mark Stringer are acknowledged for their assistance in gathering the ethnographic data on which this work is loosely based.
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Rode, J.A. Appliances for whom? Considering place. Pers Ubiquit Comput 10, 90–94 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0006-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0006-y