This article attempts to explore “dwelling” in the contemporary technonatural world through a series of novel interventions in the home. In particular, users' reactions to one of three “threshold devices”—the video window, the local barometer, and the plane tracker—are studied ethnographically. Drawing on Heidegger, the authors interpret the opaque functionality of these technologies as “poetical” insofar as they facilitate users' access to the heterogeneity, ambiguity, and complexity of the technonatural world within which the home is situated. Such access, the authors suggest, can resource a dwelling through which “care” can be enacted. Some of the methodological and political implications of such devices are discussed.
Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
2.
Bargal, D. (2006). Personal and intellectual influences leading to Lewin's paradigm of action research: Towards the 60th anniversary of Lewin's `Action research and minority problems' (1946). Action Research, 4, 367-388.
3.
Carter, S. (2007). Rise and shine: Sunlight, technology and health . Oxford, UK: Berg.
4.
Cockburn, C., & Ormerod, S. (1993). Gender and technology in the making. London: SAGE.
5.
Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Law, A., Pennington, S., Bowers, J., Beaver, J., et al. (2008). Threshold devices: Looking out from the home. In Proceeding of the 26th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy (pp. 1429-1438). New York: ACM Press.
6.
Gergen, K.J. (1991). The saturated self. New York : Basic Books.
7.
Hay, R.P. (2002). Main currents in Western environmental thought . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
8.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought. New York: Harper Colophon.
9.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays . New York: Harper Torchbooks.
10.
Knorr Cetina, K.D. (1997). Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies. Theory, Culture and Society, 14, 1-30.
11.
Lally, E. (2002). At home with computers. Oxford , UK: Berg.
12.
Latour, B. (1993). We have Never been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
13.
Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. In G. W. Lewin (Ed.), Resolving social conflicts (pp. 201-216). New York: Harper & Row.
14.
Lie, M., & Sorensen, K. H. (Eds.). (1996). Making technology our own? Domesticating technologies into everyday life. Oslo : Scandinavian University Press.
15.
McElroy, R. (2006). Labouring at leisure: Aspects of lifestyle and the rise of home improvement. In G. Smyth & J. Croft (Eds.), Our house: The representation of domestic space in modern culture (pp. 85-101). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
16.
Maleuvre, D. (1999). Museum memories: History, technology, art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
17.
Morley, D. (1992). Television, audiences and cultural studies. London: Routledge.
18.
Morley, D. (1995). Television: Not so much a visual medium, more a visible object. In C. Jenks (Ed.), Visual culture (pp. 170-189). London: Routledge.
19.
Morley, D. (2003). What's `home' got to do with it? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 435-458.
20.
Pink, S. (2004). Home truths: Gender, domestic objects and everyday life. Oxford, UK: Berg.
21.
Sengers, P., & Gaver, W. (2006). Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, University Park, PA, USA (pp. 99-108). New York: ACM Press.
22.
Shove, E. (2003). Comfort, cleanliness and convenience. Oxford, UK: Berg.
23.
Silverstone, R., & Hirsch, E. (Eds.). (1992). Consuming technologies. London: Routledge.
24.
Stengers, I. (2005). The cosmopolitical proposal. In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making things public (pp. 994-1003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory. London: Routledge.
26.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2005). What things do. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania State University Press.
27.
Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies. London : SAGE.
28.
White, D., & Wilbert, C. (Eds.). (2009). Technonatures: Environments, technologies, spaces, and places in the twenty-first century. Waterloo, ON, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press .
29.
Woolgar, S. (2002). Five rules of virtuality. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Virtual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality (pp. 1-22). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
30.
Young, J. (2000). What is dwelling? In M. A. Wrathall, J. Malpas, & H. L. Dreyfus (Eds.), Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity: Essays in honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus (pp. 187-204). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
