the home as lab:
How might the home be a place of exploration for systems of home, work, and caretaking?
This is a question not of theory or strategy, but of lived experience as a mother and designer.
The blurring of those roles has created an overlap that is often in tension with itself. What has emerged (alongside ketchup stains and walls marked with crayon) are questions about why that tension between “designer” and “parent” has to exist at all.
The systems our work environments and home environments operate within have, in practice, already been mixed, especially since COVID. And yet there is still a persistent dissonance between the functions we assign to each: work time, family time, rest time, maintenance time (laundry, meals, logistics, care).
That dissonance has led me to start treating my home as a lab, paying attention to routines, needs, and my own shifting identity as both a designer and a mother.
Some incomplete thoughts from this self-ethnographic research point toward broader systems questions.
The Domestic as a Design System
One of the core shifts in my thinking has been reframing domestic life not as “non-work,” but as a deeply complex design environment.
The home is a site of continuous coordination:
time-based logistics
emotional systems
resource allocation
negotiation and decision-making
care infrastructure
Informally, it is already a live service system.
From this perspective, motherhood and caregiving are not interruptions to design practice. They are dense, ongoing field conditions.
In this framing:
children are not separate from the system; they are co-participants
routines are not background; they are data structures
care is not invisible labor; it is a form of infrastructure design
This raises a set of questions I keep returning to:
How might design intelligence and strategy be surfaced from the domestic space?
And how might that intelligence reshape how we design beyond it?
Toward a Feminist Model of Work
If domestic systems already produce complex coordination frameworks, then they may also point toward alternative models of work.
Some speculative directions emerging from this inquiry include:
work organized around care cycles rather than continuous output
participatory models of decision-making grounded in family systems
new definitions of productivity rooted in relational and temporal awareness
hybrid spaces where caregiving, work, and research coexist rather than compete
These are not fully formed proposals. They are early signals of a larger question:
What might it look like for institutions to learn from domestic systems, rather than the other way around?
Family as Co-Design Infrastructure
Another thread in this exploration is the idea of family as a co-design system.
Families are often the first place we learn:
negotiation without hierarchy
conflict resolution in real time
shared resource management
adaptive planning under constraint
Seen this way, family systems are not separate from civic or organizational system: they are prototypes of them.
This opens up a different design question:
What if participatory methods used in organizations were informed by the lived governance structures of families?
Speculative Futures, Grounded in the Present
Some of the speculative directions I’ve been working through include:
domestic environments recognized as legitimate sites of design research
new models of work emerging from caregiving logics
family-centered co-design practices informing organizational structures
hybrid “family work centers” that integrate care, research, and civic participation
These futures are not predictions. They are provocations: ways of testing how far we can stretch the boundaries of what we call “work” before the frame itself begins to shift.
