It is surprising how socially conservative are the aspirations betrayed by the templates for the digital house of the future. The home of tomorrow is in fact an old idea and, like much science fiction, tells us more about our conceptions of the present than it does about likely futures. The most visionary futurists have us living in households that, in social rather than technological terms, resemble the idealized single-family household. The fact that “the world’s 1.6 billion homes are as diferent from one another as the countries and cultures within which they were built” is at odds with the current, deceptively simple visions of the digital home.34 The messiness of daily life is replaced with a vision of technological order. The space-age design efort is directed to a technological fix rather than engineering a less gendered allocation of housework and a better balance between working time and family time. The wired house may have much to ofer, but democracy in the kitchen is not part of the package.
While automating routine housework is rarely the focus of technoscience, there is a vast research efort dedicated to computer software agents and robotics, no doubt because of their military applications. Nursebots, for example, are currently being developed for the commercial sector, for use in residential nursing homes for the elderly. However, as with other technologies, they are bound to be adapted and marketed for the home. So will these “caring” machines alleviate time pressure?
This again raises the issue of the multiple temporalities involved in caring. Nursebots, or mobile robotic assistants, can help to provide care for the elderly. They potentially ofer assistance to escort people walking for exercise or to attend meals. These tasks are extremely timeconsuming, because old people generally move at a very slow pace. Computers can also help monitor life signs and provide reminders regarding medication. Indeed, telemedicine is fast developing as a strategy for saving time and money in health services in the United States and Europe. However, many of the physical tasks that nursebots can perform simultaneously provide an opportunity for social interaction. When the “dead labor” embodied in machines is substituted for living labor, this opportunity is stripped away.
Doing Domestic Time
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