The Socio-digital Systems Group (SDS), at Microsoft Research in Cambridge (MSRC), is involved in a number of ethnographically oriented studies of home life.

In one such study, we have been investigating the work done in and around the family home, and focused, specifically, on what we refer to as organising systems (see Taylor & Swan, 2005). These are systems that serve a dual function. Most obviously, they are designed by family members (and often mothers) to organise daily routines and activities, such as household to-dos, shopping trips, holidays, children's parties, etc. At a more fundamental level, these systems come to embody the social organisation of the home - they become a material instantiation of the way a home is socially organised.

One area we have given particular attention to in this context is the use of household lists (see Taylor and Swan, 2004). We've found lists, in their many incarnations, to be near ubiquitous in organising family activities and chores. We've also seen how the routine and practical use of lists comes to constitute (at least in part) a family home's social order. Thus, not only do lists help in household arrangements, but they also occasion a home's social relations, moral character, division of work, and so on.

As well as lists, we've investigated how households incorporate fridge surfaces into their organising systems (see Swan and Taylor, 2005). We've discovered that the fridge's physical properties afford its use as a shared display; because it provides large, clearly delineated surfaces and is centrally located in the kitchen for all to see, the fridge lends itself to being used to display information to be seen by everyone in a household. As a 'public' site, the fridge offers a space to play out family relations in an embodied fashion - the negotiations around the physical space on the fridge, as well as the content placed on its surfaces, reveal something of the social organisation of the family and often its tensions.

With this perspective, organising systems can be seen to provide a powerful resource to examine home life and contemplate the design of technologies for the home; they reveal how technologies might be fashioned to meet the pragmatic and social arrangements in family life.

One way we have begun to explore this is through the design of augmented fridge magnets. The material properties of magnets appear to offer a compelling reason to use the fridge to display shared information. The shear simplicity of interaction and the fluidity of movement they afford mean that magnets can be easily used by all to manage the information displayed on fridge surfaces. Our efforts have been to augment magnets in such a way that they build on these properties (see Taylor et al., in press).

Taylor, A. S., Harper, R., Swan, L., Izadi, S., Sellen, A. and Perry, M. Homes that make us smart. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Special Issue, At Home with IT: Pervasive Computing in the Domestic Space (in press).

Taylor, A. S., Eardley, R., Hodges, S., Regan, T., Sellen, A., Swan, L. and Wood, K. R. Augmenting refrigerator magnets: why less is sometimes more. Fourth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Nordichi '06, Oslo, Norway, (2006), 115-124.

Taylor, A. S., Izadi, S., Swan, L., Harper, R. and Buxton, B. Building bowls for miscellaneous media. Physicality ’06, (2006).

Brush, A. J., Palen, L., Swan, L. and Taylor, A. S. Special Interest Group (SIG): Designs for the home. Conference on Human Factors and Computing systems, CHI '05. ACM Press, Portland, OR, (2005), 2035-2036.

Swan, L., & Taylor, A. S. Notes on fridge doors. Conference on Human Factors and Computing systems, CHI '05. Portland, OR, (2005), 1813-1816.

Taylor, A. S. and Swan, L. Artful systems in the home. Conference on Human Factors and Computing systems, CHI '05. Portland, OR, (2005), 641-650.

Taylor, A. S. and Swan, L. List making in the home. Computer Supported Collaborative Work, CSCW '04. Chicago, IL, (2004), 542-545.

This research is being undertaken by Laurel Swan, who is based at Brunel University’s Department of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, and Alex Taylor, a researcher at MSRC. It is closely tied to an Socio-digital Systems Group project in which technology probes are being introduced into a number households in the UK to investigate the potential for ubiquitous solutions in the home.