A gender perspective highlights how diferent kinds of tasks require diferent qualities of time and that speed, and the technologies that enable speed, may not enhance the relationship between the time spent and the activity. For instance, giving and receiving care involves slowness: “being there,” as well as the emotional, afective dimensions of time. The politics of time goes beyond the redistribution of paid and unpaid work to include having time for ourselves as well as for others. More troubling for this literature on gender and time, it also asks us to rethink the relationship between care and work by foregrounding the pressures involved in straddling the multiple, contradictory temporalities of the public and private realm. The home is a domain where one ought to be able to regulate one’s own time with a latitude rarely ofered in the workplace. But is there something about the temporal modalities involved in family life that makes it especially hard to save time through automation?
Smart Houses and Caring Machines
A recurring theme of this chapter is the long-standing promise that domestic technology is the solution to the problem of housework. As with other forms of production, the future is projected in terms of automation eliminating the need for heavy and time-consuming labor. What hope is there that the smart house will finally deliver us from household drudgery? And will software agents or afective robots free us from some of the caring that slows us down?
Certainly the technological argument has intuitive appeal with regard to routine, repetitive tasks. Over the last decade, there have been a number of smart house and digital home installations and experiments in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Yet prototypes of the intelligent house tend to ignore the whole range of functions that come under the umbrella of housework. Magazines like Wired and science fiction films like The Matrix present ubiquitous computing as the backbone infrastructure of the twenty-first-century lifestyle. Home informatics, much hyped as the Internet of Things, is mainly concerned with the centralized control of heating, lighting, security, information, entertainment, and energy consumption. My suspicion that designers and producers of the technological home have little interest in housework is confirmed by depictions of the MIT Media Lab’s “CityHome,” with its moving walls that enable the transformation of your bedroom into a gym.
Doing Domestic Time
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