Episode 2 (2022) Cansu Güner - Hack the house! Reconfiguring domesticity in co-living spaces

This episode is with Doctoral Candidate Cansu Güner from School
of Social Sciences and Technology at Technical University of
Münich.

This podcast is about hacking houses. Entrepreneurs with
engineering backgrounds who live in co-living spaces tend to hack
their houses either as part of a hackathon or via self-initiated
hacking practices. Drawing from a one-year-long ethnography on
hacking practices in co-living spaces in the Bay Area and Munich,
I aim to answer the following questions: what would happen if the
subjects of domestic work would also be equipped with the
technological know-how and expertise that would potentially
reconfigure the domestic ideology? Would then they position
domesticity as their domain of innovation and intervention? What
kind of domestic ideal would they have? What kind of
technological interventions would they make or not make?

Specifically, I would like to compare two home automation
systems, namely the Weekly Task Planner (WTP) and the Hidden
Camera, which had been created as a result of hacking practices
in co-living spaces. In Munich, the WTP was created to help
residents to keep track of predefined domestic tasks, e. g.,
cleaning, by automatically assigning them to people every week.
In the Bay Area, one of the residents hacked the problem of dirty
dishes by installing a hidden camera in the kitchen to surveil
and shame the irresponsible residents who fail to fulfill their
chores not for accustomed reasons such as safety and security
purposes.

Drawing on feminist STS (Schwartz-Cowan 1976; Cockburn 1997;
Naulin and Jourdain, 2020; Fraiman 2017; Kleif and Faulkner,
2003; Suchmann 2007), I would like to shed light on how
hackathons and hacking practices have been utilized as ways of
remaking domestic culture(s). I argue that co-living as a
technosocial project is subjected to the entreprenurialization of
domesticity in which the domestic activities become dominated by
entrepreneurial ambitions like hacking. Situational analysis,
in-depth interviews, and ethnography are employed as the main
methods.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The
Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel
organized at the European Association for the study of Science
and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07.
The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala.
Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also
produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University
of Technology for funding.