The Work to Make a Home Network Work

Abstract

Abstract:Recently, households have begun to adopt networking technologies to interconnect devices within the home. Yet little is known about the consequences for households of setting up and living with these complex networks, nor the impact of such technologies on the routines of the home. In this paper, we report findings from an empirical study of households containing complex networks of computer and audio/visual technologies. Our study finds that home networks require significant household effort not just to coordinate their use, but also their set up and maintenance. We also show how the coordination around networking has to be worked into the routines of the home and the householders.

Putting the gender back in digital housekeeping

“…For over a decade, human-computer interaction researchers have studied the role of information technologies in domestic life, exploring routines of use [10,37,55], effects of life disruptions on usage [15,34,46], divisions of labor [21,22,42,46,48], collocated gameplay [60], communication [26,27], and coordination [13,36,52]. While there is some discussion of the gendered nature of engagement with technology in homes [3,5,36] digital housekeeping, gender has been a carefully sidestepped (perhaps even taboo?)…”

Characterizing home network traffic: an inside view

“…To aid in troubleshooting and managing home networks, [18] proposes to build a home network data recorder system as a general-purpose logging platform to record what is happening in home networks. Many researches have also focused human computer interactions in home networks [2][3][4], troubleshooting and diagnosis [5,6], and broadband network sharing among different Internet service providers [19].…”

“…Most home users lack technical expertise to manage the increasingly complicated home networks, and an extensive body of research have focused on how to simplify network management tasks for home users [2][3][4][5][6]. Several recent studies have been devoted to understanding traffic characteristics of home networks using aggregated and sampled traffic collected from edge routers in Internet service providers [7][8][9].…”

Providing an Integrated User Experience of Networked Media, Devices, and Services through End-User Composition

“…Venkatesh, et al have described the home as a set of overlapping "centers" [25] (earlier called "sub-environments" [24]) that have differing relationships to the technical "space" of the home. Household occupants appropriate both "technical" (e.g., computers, networking equipment, televisions) and "non-technical" (e.g., doors, tables, mantelpieces) resources in various ways to support their multiple practices, as has been described for communication [5], household coordination [21], work [26], and entertainment [10], In addition, these resources are accreted over time rather than all at once [8,18] and are often repurposed into different roles multiple times throughout the course of their useful life [10].…”

“…Both OSCAR and the testbed devices and services were implemented atop the Obje Framework [10], which is a mobile-code based interoperability framework previously developed in our lab at PARC. The dependence on Obje does not limit the generality of OSCAR's contribution, as the solutions provided by OSCAR are applicable with little modification to a number of more widely available interoperability platforms such as UPnP [23], Jini [27], and Zeroconf [13].…”