Private and public digital domestic spaces

Abstract

With the introduction of information and communication technologies into our homes and the different physical and communicative expressions this implies for our living spaces the concepts of being private and of beingpublic become crucial. In this paper, we introduce A Pattern Language, developed by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s, in order to handle these problems systematically. The presentation formally follows Alexander's structure in five cases all related to practical experiments on being private and public at home. We start with a number of concrete user situations related to human–computer interaction. Social and communicative phenomena or possibilities end up in novel design patterns at the interface between an architectural and a technological perspective. The novel patterns presented are primarily based on experiences from practical work on the development of a conceptual dwelling of the future, comHOME, designed and constructed as a full-scale model of a flat. By creating different zones for video-mediated communication, comZONES, the user can control the private and public digital areas varying in time and space. The novel patterns refer to two separate levels. On the first level a specific pattern, called “PRIVATE AND PUBLIC DIGITAL SPACES”, is designed as a conceptual floor plan layout. This plan distributes private and public digital spaces for video-mediated communication over the flat. At a second level, four patterns show the integration of the specific comZONES aiming at solving four specific problems with video-mediated communication at home. Our intention is to describe the application of design patterns as a method for analysing and solving novel problems encountered with the introduction of information and communication technologies in our homes. The video-mediated set-ups are not dealt with in depth. They serve mainly as designs that make it possible to apply the design patterns.