Knowing Families in the Digital Era
Through mixed qualitative methods including child-led mobile interviews, the Smart Living study investigates the nuanced ways in which technologies become embedded in, and reconfigure, family life, and what ‘doing family digitally’ might mean for the future of knowledges in a domestic setting. We explore the relationships different family members have to the knowledge sources and practices smart technology brings into the home, what kind of everyday family practices smart technology is designed to reproduce and augment, and what forms of knowledge might become unfamiliar, inaccessible or unthinkable. To what extent are family norms changed or challenged by the affordances and function creeps of technology, as doing family offline becomes alien, and the dynamics of the home shift as children take advantage of ‘democratising’ aspects of technology?
This paper focuses on the use of voice-based interfaces, which represent a significant shift in how information is accessed, with important consequences for the production and sharing of information. We draw on empirical evidence that suggests the prevalence of design values that are not reflective of families’ everyday needs, which are nevertheless ‘satisficed’ (Edmond, Horsley, Lehmann and Priddy 2022) as users are ‘locked in’ to big tech companies’ visions of sociodigital futures. Finally, we discuss potential consequences for the representation of diverse knowledges in the context of the family home.