The Interior as Digital Disruptor

Abstract

For many across the planet, our lives are consumed by a digital world. From checking updates via social media to controlling smart devices within our homes via mobile phone apps, our daily interactions are inextricably bound to digital networks. The domestic interior of the twenty-first century provides a new domain and fertile ground for embedded technology to access the choreography of our inhabitation of home. In this context, digital devices such as RingBell, Bluetooth speakers, or smart thermostats are increasingly indistinguishable from pseudo-surveillance agents that have the capacity to harvest and translate our patterns of occupancy into data for myriad commercial purposes.

While there may be many benefits to welcoming digital automation into domestic settings, the need for caution and increased understanding of how our personal information can be used for digital capitalism requires increasing attention. We are compelled to ask questions: What is being revealed about our domestic lives, and to what extent can the inclusion of digital devices impact how we behave and occupy our interior environments?

This essay re-imagines the domestic interior as a contested territory of digital privacy. It considers scenarios where design interventions may operate to actively construct and conserve our private identities. Focusing on the surveillance aspect of digital devices within the home, it speculates on how designed interior surfaces and wearables can act as masks that seek to distort and evade the unwelcome digital infringement. In this context, the ordinary housecoat is proposed as a possible tool of resistance — a moving glitch within the home. Proposed as a camouflage device, mimetic properties of new designs are explored for their capacity to disrupt visual surveillance and reclaim interior spaces for the body. In essence, they conceal us from digital objectification by invasive technologies. The housecoat as disruptor explores the subversion of this mundane domestic garment from its historical purpose of comfort to a new counter-surveillance tool. Extended to designed interventions in domestic environments, it introduces ideas about how our interiors may become sites of resistance against digital surveillance in the home.