Contemporary Home Research Articles

The housing bomb: why our addiction to houses is destroying the environment and threatening our society

Have we built our way to ruin? Is your desire for that beach house or cabin in the woods part of the environmental crisis? Do you really need a bigger home? Why don't multiple generations still live under one roof? In The Housing Bomb, leading environmental researchers M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu sound the alarm, explaining how and why our growing addiction to houses has taken the humble American dream and twisted it into an environmental and societal nightmare. Without realizing how much a contemporary home already contributes to environmental destruction, most of us want bigger and bigger houses and dream of the day when we not just one dwelling but at least the two our neighbor does. We push our children to get out on their own long before they need to, creating a second household where previously one existed. We pave and build, demolishing habitat needed by threatened and endangered species, adding to the mounting burden of global climate change, and sucking away resources much better applied to pressing societal needs. Reduce, reuse, recycle is seldom evoked in the world, where economists predict financial disasters when new starts decline and the idea of renovating inner city residences is regarded as merely a good cause. Presenting irrefutable evidence, this book cries out for America and the world to intervene by making simple changes in our household energy and water usage and by supporting municipal, state, national, and international policies to counter this devastation and overuse of resources. It offers a way out of the mess we are creating and envisions a future where we all live comfortable, nondestructive lives. The housing bomb is ticking, and our choice is clear-change our approach or feel the blast.

A LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR MONITORING SYSTEM BASED ON A WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Automated heating, lighting and irrigation systems are nowadays standard features of industrial and commercial buildings, and are also increasingly found in ordinary housing. In addition to the benefits of user comfort, automated technology for buildings saves energy and, above all, it provides enhanced protection against leakage of water and hazardous gases, and against fire hazards. Lightning strikes are a natural phenomenon that poses a significant threat to the safety of buildings. The statistics of the Fire and Rescue Service of the Czech Republic show that buildings are in many cases inadequately protected against lightning strikes, or that systems have been damaged by previous strikes. A subsequent strike can occur within the period between regular inspections, which are normally made at intervals of 2–4 years. Over the whole of Europe, thousands of buildings are subjected to the effects of direct lightning strikes each year. This paper presents ways to carry out wireless monitoring of lightning strikes on buildings and to deal with their impact on lightning conductors. By intervening promptly (disconnecting the power supply, disconnecting the gas supply, sending an engineer to inspect the structure, submitting a report to ARC, etc.) we can prevent many downstream effects of direct lightning strikes on buildings (fires, electric shocks, etc.) This paper introduces a way to enhance contemporary home automation systems for monitoring lightning strikes based on wireless sensor networks technology.

Space for Play?

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how children, toys, and play are accommodated in the spaces of the contemporary home in order to highlight the often overlooked connections between home as an imaginative space and housing as a physical location in which people reside. We do this by exploring how families in private, new-build homes in contemporary Scotland reconfigure domestic space through the creation of a new kind of internal domestic space—the “toy room.” Analysis leads to a consideration of how the rules and routines of homemaking join people, places, and things together or deliberately separate them out. We conclude that the emergence of the toy room is an improvised solution to a problem exacerbated by the growth of children's consumption of toys and playthings, shrinking room size, limited flexibility of the available space, and the shortage of storage in new-build homes, as well as a domestic aesthetic ideal adverse to clutter.

Residents Speak Out: Re-Appraising Home Ownership, Property Rights and Place Attachment in a Risk Society

Allied to notions of late modernity, Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” has found relevance in light of recent technological and global economic crises. By means of focus group research undertaken in Queensland, Australia, this article explores the relation of such concepts and dislocations to home ownership, property rights and place attachment, asking to what extent home ownership can be seen as a depository and remedy for the consequences of Beckian uncertainty. The findings are that, whereas the Maslovian attributes of safety, security and belongingness continue to be the root of contemporary home ownership, its meaning is elaborated when higher-order concepts such as lifestyle, identity, social capital and trust, and ontological security are entered into the analysis. Moreover, the traditional use value of a home is now intertwined with exchange value, though the latter is interpreted not proactively but more in a defensive sense.

Health consumption as work: The home pregnancy test as a domesticated health tool

A growing array of biomedical goods and services has become central to the North American experience of navigating illness and pursuing good health. Yet despite the utility of consumption as an analytical framework within the social sciences, the selection, purchase, and use of biomedical goods and services has been understudied. By using the home pregnancy test as a case study, we suggest new approaches to thinking about the consumption of these goods and services. We chose the home pregnancy test because it is the best-known example of a mass-produced diagnostic tool used by consumers. We draw on two sources of data for this qualitative analysis: a set of stories submitted between 2003 and 2005 by women and men to an online exhibit mounted by the National Institutes of Health called “A Thin Blue Line: The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit,” which we analysed between 2006 and 2007; and web sampling conducted in 2009 and 2010 of personal web and video logs of women and men who have posted stories and opinions about their experiences with contemporary home pregnancy testing products. We adapt the term “domestication” from Science and Technology Studies scholarship to describe the movement of diagnostic devices into homes for use by consumers. Specifically, we propose that the consumption of domesticated biomedical devices, goods, and services should be theorized as work performed by consumers, in two senses: as a form of tool use that allows non-experts to produce diagnostic knowledge about their own bodies and health; and as the ongoing biopolitical work that is expected of citizens to produce healthy bodies. Our paper draws attention to these understudied phenomena, while suggesting new approaches to theorizing the social and cultural elements of goods and services for health.

Contemporary Home Care Service and Family Medicine in Turkey

Home care service is providing health care to the patient in his or her dwelling when care in the hospital is no longer required. Home care services provide not only medical services but also the social services that the human needs. Studies concerning home care services bear great importance. In this review, the authors aim to guide new studies by stating the legal and scientific point reached at the moment in Turkey.

Pedagogical Approaches to Diversity in the English Classroom

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

Contemporary Home Loan Pricing Strategies: An Australian Perspective

Contemporary Home Loan Pricing Strategies: An Australian Perspective

Experimenting new design languages in contemporary home design

The changes in society at the beginning of this millennium are giving rise to deep transformations in the behavioural trends and tastes of home users, as well as in their lifestyles and consumption patterns. This opens up a wide range of opportunities for innovation within the context of contemporary home design. Due to the emergence of new user profiles, new needs and models are coming to the attention of designers and manufacturing companies. Just think about the new needs resulting from the changing composition of households, new forms of cohabitation and the contemporary multi-ethnic society.

Unpacking Municipal Home Rule: Can California Regionalists and Locals Talk to One Another?

This article focuses on the contemporary home rule discourse in California and how it relates to state-level efforts to promote regional governance and regional planning initiatives. The purpose here is to unpack the contemporary home rule discourse, as represented by a series of articles on home rule that appeared between 1997 and 2001 in the League of California Cities’ journal Western City. By unpacking the discourse, the major strains of the argument for home rule are identified. Once identified, the article argues that the foundations of the home rule discourse provide opportunities to evaluate and strengthen the discourse on regionalism and regional governance, perhaps to the benefit of both regional and home rule advocates. Via discourse analysis and the lessons which it uncovers, the article provides a useful lens through which other State-home rule and regional planning debates can be considered critically.

Spatial practices and the home as hospice

The modern hospice movement emerged in the late 1960s largely as a reaction to the way in which death and dying were dealt with in the hospital building. From the early development of the hospice movement, setting was considered to be very important. Hospice buildings were more residential and "homely" than their hospital counterparts. However, with the widespread development of "hospice home-care" programmes in the 1980s, this emphasis on place and setting changed, and along with it the meaning of the term "hospice" has changed. The current claim of the hospice movement is that "hospice" is a philosophy of care not a building or place.Home is now widely considered to be the best place to die, a place of familiar surroundings and the company of family and friends. The modern preference to die at home relies on traditional models of home, family and community. Dying at home was at one time commonplace and envisioned within the design of the home, and caring was a normal expectation of key family members. In modern society, however, dying is generally not a considered function within the design brief of the home and families may be unable, through economic, geographical or other reasons, to be carers. Thus, for some, home may not be the best place to die and family may not be the best carer. As a result, many people, despite their preference for home, still end up dying in the hospital building. This paper discusses the spatial issues surrounding the concept of home as hospice and questions the universal suitability of the contemporary home as a hospice.

Pure random search for ambient sensor distribution optimisation in a smart home environment

Smart homes are living spaces facilitated with technology to allow individuals to remain in their own homes for longer, rather than be institutionalised. Sensors are the fundamental physical layer with any smart home, as the data they generate is used to inform decision support systems, facilitating appropriate actuator actions. Positioning of sensors is therefore a fundamental characteristic of a smart home. Contemporary smart home sensor distribution is aligned to either a) a total coverage approach; b) a human assessment approach. These methods for sensor arrangement are not data driven strategies, are unempirical and frequently irrational. This Study hypothesised that sensor deployment directed by an optimisation method that utilises inhabitants' spatial frequency data as the search space, would produce more optimal sensor distributions vs. the current method of sensor deployment by engineers. Seven human engineers were tasked to create sensor distributions based on perceived utility for 9 deployment scenarios. A Pure Random Search (PRS) algorithm was then tasked to create matched sensor distributions. The PRS method produced superior distributions in 98.4% of test cases (n=64) against human engineer instructed deployments when the engineers had no access to the spatial frequency data, and in 92.0% of test cases (n=64) when engineers had full access to these data. These results thus confirmed the hypothesis.

Chronic Disease: Are We Missing Something?

Chronic Disease: Are We Missing Something?

The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity

THE CINEMA OF NARUSE MIKIO: WOMEN AND JAPANESE MODERNITY By Catherine Russell Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 485 + xiii pages. Reviewed by William Beard This is an impressive and valuable book. Mikio Naruse (and I hope Russell will forgive me for reverting to the old incorrect patronymic-last order for Japanese names) has for decades been a source of curiosity for cinephiles in the west, especially for those with an interest in Japanese classical cinema. Thanks to Russell's massive efforts, now have a book that will in all likelihood continue to be the standard English-language study of this filmmaker for a long time. The first generation of English-language scholarship on Japanese film summarized the work not only of the big three (Mizoguchi, Kurosawa), but seemed to concur that Naruse was a strong fourth-place finisher in the Japanese classical cinema sweepstakes. Here was a filmmaker who was a contemporary of Mizoguchi and who flourished in the Japanese studio system (mainly at Toho) , whose films figured profusely in the Kinema Jumpo annual lists of critics' choices, and who was reputed to be an artist of great sensitivity in the contemporary home genre where Ozu also dwelt. But for many years not a single Naruse film was generally available in the west, and until quite recently only two, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Late Chrysanthemums, were even available on VHS. Then in 2007 the gates opened, and out came six features from the 1950s on two 3-disk DVD sets (one from Eureka Masters of Cinema and the other from the British Film Institute, the former with a hefty booklet containing lengthy extracts from Russell's own work-in-progress). Now there is a full-scale Naruse excavation going on, with various internet sources offering relays of Japanese DVD issues and television broadcasts with English subtitles provided by ultradedicated fans. His films are well worth investigation. Naruse's films, though not without a distinctive style, have a far less consistent and visible formal pattern than those of Mizoguchi or Kurosawa. After what I would call a somewhat modernist (and what David Bordwell in his book on Ozu would call a decorated) period in the early 1930s, featuring lurid camera movements, flurries of almost Soviet avant-garde editing, and startling disruptions of continuity, Naruse moved virtually overnight into a far quieter and more transparent style - transparent, that is, to an eye accustomed to the contemporaneous practice of Hollywood classicism. Here he settled for the remainder of his career (which ended in 1967), although this home base could accommodate many subtle eccentricities in shot disposition and editing, and a few quite radical departures in the handling of flashbacks, along with some unusually elaborate exercises in large-scale parallel montage. Russell is persistent and meticulous in tracing all these distinguishing features, and their description and analysis is one of the many useful aspects of her study. That task required close attention, because after the 1930s one can describe Naruse's technique as being motivated solely by the needs of his scenarios. This is different from saying that the content and meaning of Ozu's or Mizoguchi's cinemas is completely in harmony with their styles, because there is always a sense with, for example, Mizoguchi that the compositional elements, organic spaces, and decorous rhythms of his visual world are elements that can be described in themselves. With Naruse one always wants to describe how the style is handling the requirements of particular scenes or situations - if, indeed, one is noticing the style at all. Shiro Kido, the production head of Shochiku's Tokyo operation, remarked during Naruse's short time at that studio that we don't need another Ozu, and this remark clearly refers to their commonalities of subject matter and sensitive, low-key realism. They are quite different filmmakers, though, as Russell documents conclusively. …

Home economics as an integrated, holistic system: revisiting Bubolz and Sontag's 1988 human ecology approach

AbstractThis article explores how Bubolz and Sontag's seminal work on integration in home economics and human ecology can inform contemporary home economics practice. They argue that the human ecology perspective can be used to view the whole of home economics, and the subprofessions (specializations) within the whole, as diverse yet unified. This article employs a spider plant as a metaphor to illustrate the value of embracing the notion of home economics as an integrated, holistic system.

Así en la cocina como en la fábrica

Case study: definition, development and crisis of contemporary home kitchen in Europe. The paper draws on gender interpretations currently successful in History of Design. The Haus am Horn kitchen in the Exhibition Bauhaus, Weimar, 1923. The Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Grete Schutte-Lihotzky in 1927. Proposals for communes and collective kitchens. Identifying weaknesses in response to the current characteristics of the welfare society. Approach to their capacity to contribute to the incompleteness of gender equality process by encouraging the sociability and responsibility in household chores.

Domesticating Citizenship: The Kairotopics of America's Post-9/11 Home Makeover

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist.

Margi Park concept design: Nursing home for seniors and EU-standards

The physical environment has a great potential for supporting resident's residual way-finding abilities. Until now little systematic research has been carried out to identify supportive architectural characteristics. The architectural structure of the buildings and the impact of the different architectural characteristics was also analyzed. Results show that people with advancing dementia are increasingly dependent on a compensating environment. Our experience in design of contemporary homes and its environment for elderly persons is an example how the young generation can remain an integral part of the elderly peoples lives. Any Cooperation between Serbia and Germany is to be in accordance with European Standards and Norms.

The Screen and the Drum: On Form, Function, Fit and Failure in Contemporary Home Consumption

ABSTRACTThis paper explores consumers' connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick. The mundane movements and moments that comprise homemaking encompass a whole suite of entanglements between object, subject, agency and space. In all sorts of ways this opens up exciting—but also difficult and perplexing—possibilities for consumer agency in the production of home. New kinds of temporality, the rapidity of fashion and design shifts, transformative technologies and new modes of fabrication require new forms of consumption knowledge, competence and skill.

Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (review)

Reviewed by: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories Robert Goff (bio) Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Pp. xix+333. $60/$24.95. This is an informative and useful collection of essays on the historical and cultural significance of home movies, or, more broadly, amateur film. It grew out of a conference organized by coeditor Karen Ishizuka at the Getty Institute in 1998 and attended by a group of film archivists, scholars, and filmmakers. Coeditor Patricia Zimmermann introduces the essays and traces the development—before and after the 1998 conference—of a now well-established international movement to collect, preserve, and study amateur films. The collection of essays reflects not only the multicultural and international perspectives of the contributors but also a diverse range of approaches to their subject. Leading film curators present overviews of their growing archives of amateur film or highlight specific films from their collection, filmmakers discuss the uses they have made of home movies, and academics try to make scholarly sense of these “orphan” films. There is much to learn from many of these contributors, but Zimmermann’s “collage” arrangement leaves the reader with little guidance as to how to navigate through all twenty-seven essays. There are no subheadings and seemingly little order to the placement of the contributions. I would have liked at least some attempt at organization by geography or time period, or simply by some identifiable theme. I discovered—somewhat laboriously—that the trauma of World War II as recorded by amateur filmmakers was the content of a significant number of entries, with five essays largely concerned with film of the internment of Japanese Americans. Topaz (footage by an inmate of a Utah internment camp of that name) is only the second home movie, after the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, to be accepted on the National Film Registry, and this important milestone is discussed at length in the entry on the work of the Registry. The Holocaust is invoked by London’s Imperial War Museum’s home movies of a Belgian family who successfully sheltered two Jewish children during World War II and also by a critical analysis of The Maelstrom, a movie by contemporary filmmaker Péter Forgács, which incorporated home movies of a Jewish family in Holland, most of whose members later died in the Holocaust. Forgács himself contributes a theoretical essay on home movies, with some discussion of his own films. Zimmermann mentions that many amateur filmmakers imitated Hollywood narratives (and she explores this theme in greater length in her 1995 Reel Families, an important social history of American home movies), but none of the contributors seriously examine the links between Hollywood and the world of amateur film. The Academy Film Archive collects not only Academy Award–winning movies but also has a large archive of [End Page 956] the home movies by Hollywood professionals, as does the Library of Congress. This footage raises the question of how “amateur” some of the films in these collections actually are. Certain essays note that film equipment was too expensive for most working-class citizens in Western European countries up to the 1960s, and this lack of affordability still persists for people in many places. Understanding the class perspective of those who made amateur films can be illuminating, and a perceptive reading by Heather Norris Nicholson of some films shot by middle-class hobbyists of factory workers says much about the class structure in northern England in the 1940s and 1950s. Another illuminating essay, by Nico De Klerk, concerns films made in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century. By singling out key shots of Dutch colonialists interacting with their native servants, De Klerk demonstrates that the “situational rootedness” of home movies can cut through abstract theorizing about colonial relationships and reveal important details no other medium can provide. Roger Odin’s theoretical essay on the family home movie is the only one to mention the availability of contemporary home movies on the internet. The increasing significance of YouTube and other web outlets suggests the...