Call for Participation
Smart home technologies increasingly promise support for domestic care. But how is care coordinated and sustained when domestic ecologies shift, for example through changing relationships, dwelling constraints, or housing rules and service dependencies? This workshop reframes smart home technologies as infrastructures of care situated in changing domestic ecologies spanning home (relationships and care norms), house (dwelling materialities and spatial thresholds), and housing (tenure, governance, and service dependencies). Over a full day, we bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to move beyond device-centric interaction and examine how care arrangements become feasible or fragile across these layers. Together, we will explore: (1) coordination across actors and care infrastructures; (2) temporality and care continuity in evolving environments; and (3) interdisciplinary dialogue that bridges HCI, design, human geography and housing studies, design anthropology, and STS. We welcome submissions that:
Study smart home and IoT systems in domestic life
Engage care practices, including ageing, disability, childcare, self-care, and more-than-human care
Bring perspectives from the disciplines above
To participate, submit either (1) a short position paper (4 pages, including references, using the ACM single-column template) or case note or (2) an equivalent portfolio or video contribution. Please email your submission to renxuan.liu@sydney.edu.au
About the Workshop
Smart home technologies increasingly promise support for domestic care. Yet, related research typically treats the setting where care takes place—the home—as a stable container for interaction, neglecting the broader and changing ecological conditions that make care arrangements feasible or fragile. This workshop reframes smart home technologies as infrastructures of care situated in domestic ecologies spanning home, house, and housing. Addressing these requires an interdisciplinary perspective that bridges HCI, interaction and service design, human geography, and design anthropology.
We invite participants from these areas to examine (1) coordination as ecological care work across actors and infrastructures, (2) temporality as care continuity in non-static ecologies, and (3) the need for a shared understanding of the smart home technologies in domestic care from different disciplines. Participants will co-produce an open resource pack: a cross-disciplinary glossary, mapping canvases, and trajectory patterns that surface critical elements of domestic care ecologies and design opportunities for future smart home design.
Workshop Theme
Theme 1
When we foreground ecologies, coordination no longer means that a user operating a device, or even family members negotiating in a shared space. Instead, coordination becomes distributed across heterogeneous actors (like co-present and remote, human and more-than-human) and the interdependencies of infrastructures, including device vendors, policies, and network base stations. For example, when the new smart control panel is introduced, the new caregiver might avoid using the complex system and instead coordinate care through handwritten notes or messages. Similarly, when tenants move into a new apartment with smart home devices, coordination is needed not only with new roommates but also with the new spatial arrangements. Therefore, from an ecological perspective, domestic care involves a process of ongoing coordination among different actors and infrastructure within and beyond the home.
Theme 2
An ecological perspective also requires a temporal consideration, because, as we mentioned, domestic ecologies are not static. This matters for care because care is not a one-off service or a sequence of isolated tasks; it is everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world. Over time, care arrangements require reassembly: what begins as a workable setup can drift when a new caregiver joins, or when devices must be dismantled and rebuilt after moving. Housing dynamics also intensify this temporality: lease renewals, restrictions on drilling or wiring, changes in utility arrangements, or provider churn can abruptly force reconfiguration. Thus, temporality is a key aspect in the continuity of care arrangements as ecologies co-evolve across home, house, and housing.
Theme 3
Many elements of this ecological account have been discussed across disciplines, yet they are often framed through different research traditions and views, and foregrounded differently. HCI has rich discussions for analysing interactional coordination work between humans and devices, while other fields like human geography and design anthropology attend to domestic relationality, dwelling materiality, tenure, governance, and market ecologies as constitutive conditions of domestic life. We therefore call for an opportunity that can align these viewpoints through shared concepts and analytic tools.
Organisers
Lecturer in service/social design at the University of Sydney
Professor of Design Anthropology at the University of Sydney
Assistant Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology
Workshop Schedule
