“Collective wisdom”: Inquiring into collective homes as a site for HCI design

The home has been a major focus of the HCI community for over two decades. Despite this body of research, nascent works have argued that HCI’s characterization of ‘the home’ remains narrow and requires more diverse accounts of domestic configurations. This thesis contributes to HCI studies of domestic environments through a four-month ethnography of three collective homes in Vancouver, Canada. Collective homes represent an alternative housing model that offers agency to individual members and the collective group by sharing values, resources, labour, space and memory. This research offers two contributions. First, I offer an in-depth design ethnography of three collective homes, attending to the values, ownership models, practices, and everyday interactions observed in the ongoing making of these domestic settings. Second, I interpret and synthesize my findings to provide new opportunities for expanding the way we conceptualize and design for ‘the home’ in HCI.