Home Beyond Home

Abstract

This article attempts to explore “dwelling” in the contemporary technonatural world through a series of novel interventions in the home. In particular, users' reactions to one of three “threshold devices”—the video window, the local barometer, and the plane tracker—are studied ethnographically. Drawing on Heidegger, the authors interpret the opaque functionality of these technologies as “poetical” insofar as they facilitate users' access to the heterogeneity, ambiguity, and complexity of the technonatural world within which the home is situated. Such access, the authors suggest, can resource a dwelling through which “care” can be enacted. Some of the methodological and political implications of such devices are discussed.