The purpose of this paper is to give a rationale and an (partial) intellectual lineage for the data gathering technique dubbed ‘Show us your home’. This method was used in conjunction with standard format interviewing in the context of collecting resident-focussed data at both 213/183/153 Petershill Road, Red Road, and Block 22, Bukit Ho Swee.

 ‘Show us your home’ (SUYH) is a method of gathering information about people in, and in action with, their homes. It works as a data gathering method in conjunction with standard format interviews but it was adopted as a way of  rupturing the relatively static framing of the interview. Basically, the provisional notion was to think about asking residents to show us their homes as a mechanism for activating the socio-materiality of the home, the lived event of the home. In its spirit is stands alongside observational techniques of watching and recording everyday home activities. Those fly-on-the-wall techniques we viewed as overly invasive and more resource rich than we could support in the project. 

Context

SUYH was adopted and designed with both the benefit and burden of a long sociological tradition of post-occupancy studies of highrise living.  That tradition of social science work routinely positions the resident as the primary human in the picture of a housing event.  Because the resident is the consumer and the one who, quite literally, has to ‘live with it’, this appears to be a self-evident step. But it is also true that in doing this a specific technique of data collection is privileged, this being the interview and the resident opinion, and a certain structure of agency assumed. Furthermore, this existing scholarship operates with an explanatory infrastructure, which vibrates widely between environmental determinism and resistant human agency. We can think here of Riaz Hassan’s (1977) account of height and well-being in Singaporean highrises (Jephcott’s (1971) account of user dissatisfaction in Glasgow. But we could also hold within the outer limits of this humanist frame the more recent and more critically studies such as Danny Miller’s (1988) study of resident appropriations of UK council flat kitchens or Chua Beng Huat’s account of the culturalist adjustments made by different religious groups to Singapore highrises.

Our exercise of talking with residents had to negotiate that past scholarship and all the time resist a user evaluation / posts-occupancy model and stay with the question of what kinds of socio-technical associations made living in the highrise possible. One strategy was to take into the method a commitment to thinking not just in terms of ‘attitudes’ but also practical doings. And we had to do this, because of resource limitations, and general lack of nerve on my part, without the obvious method of observing for long periods people going about their ordinary business in the home.  Our compromise was the ‘Show us Your Home’ exercise, itself influenced by recent traditions in the field of home and design studies which feature a attending to the objects in the home and how they are narrated. Here we might think of the work of Irene Cieraad (1999). But in our work we also used video recording in the service of this, much like the ‘cultural inventories’ of Collier and Collier (1986) or Sarah Pink’s (2007) use of video to register the performance and experience of the sensory home, or the ethnoarchaeological approach of acholars in the in the UCLA Centre for Everyday lives of Families (Arnold and Graesch 2002, Ochs et al 2004). These methods also have much in common with what some geographers are now calling a ‘walking and talking’ methodology including David Crouch’s (2003, 1945) performativity-based interest in ‘tangles with the mundane’.

Aims and parameters

As a data gathering technique ‘Show Us You Home’ considered these questions and goals in its development:

1. It is an excellent way of soliciting information on the relation between residents and the things with which they live.  This said, the ‘show me’ action frame activates objects/things in a ‘home viewing’ structure, as opposed to a naturalised structure. That said, there is additional information solicited in and through the ‘show me’ directive. For example, opening a window as part of  a ‘show me your view’ directive reveals a range of verbalised comments about what is right and wrong with the view/window/opening and closing mechanisms etc. Observations of a window being opened in the course of ordinary action would reveal such data through action, but not have the overlay commentary.

2. Although for some to automatically show around a new visitor to their house is natural and automatic, we did not assume this was something residents felt comfortable with, especially in the context of us being strangers/researchers and where, consequently, what was at stake for the resident/participant may be less clear. What is shown/seen in SUYH is directed by the resident and the interviewer is unison: the resident determined which rooms were to be shown (residents were told that they could show us just the parts of the house they felt comfortable with us seeing), while the prompts of the interviewer helped determine what aspects of the rooms that were shown were dwelt upon and discussed.

3. The problem of ‘show’ request was pondered at length by the research team prior to the start of the data collection through the ShowUYH technique. Although in-situ, walking/talking interviewing is now considered a valuable way of soliciting additional information, our exercise had an over-riding directive of ‘showing’. This led us to ask: What does the structure of ‘showing’ activate and NOT activate? In the first instance we held a reservation that showing would be ‘too distantiated’ -  translated immediately into the order of the narrated visual as opposed to the lived moment.  For example, the SUYH request structures in a certain distance between the respondent, the thing/room being shown, and the interviewer/camera. The SUYH event tends to immediately frame the house/room (1) as a scene, (2) as something that is pointed at or gestured towards, but not actively engaged with. As such, we had to think of ways of getting residents interacting – see ‘enactment’ below.

4. The problem of ‘home’. Asking people to SUYHome does not use neutral language: ‘home’ is something other than house, room, surrounds where you live. It is a phrase that carries with it assumptions, perhaps about tenure, certainly about feelings of belonging and possession; perhaps also about comfort. In short, the term prematurely frames as ‘home’ the components that make up the space and furnishings and mechanisms that are the resident’s surroundings. We were always aware then that our request to SUYH activated an invitation and a notion that might be received ambivalently. As such, we did not assume that the SUYH would activate tours and commentaries that were shaped by someone feeling ‘house proud’, to coin a cliché term. Many of the houses we worked in were rental social housing or relatively modest, early generation state housing. As such, the invitation to SUYH often solicited excuses, apologies, commentaries of limits. These commentaries made us acutely aware of the fact that the request to SUYHome, by using the term ‘home’, created a coherence to the viewed object that might be experienced differently by the various residents. Furthermore, and thinking more socio-technically, the use of the term ‘home’ assembled things into an apparent whole, when in fact our aim always was to get close to the unstable logics by which the varied socio-technical components that assemble to produce the thing called ‘home’ (or even ‘successful housing’ or ‘failed housing’) are brought into view. This ethos of not assuming coherence (here the coherence delivered by the term ‘home’) was a very important conceptual caveat to our search for seeing how the building events at the centre of our study held together (‘successful housing’) or fell apart (‘failed housing’).

5. The ‘problem’ of the ‘returning subject’. The standard format interview and SUYH both carried the burden of the human subject. Let us be clear here. In a study which has as its conceptual frame a commitment to seeing socio-technical orders, but does not a priori assume social or human dominance of those orders, there is a need to de-centre the social subject in data gathering and analysis. How does one do that? Can one do that when the research process is itself a social event? With this ethos in place and these questions in mind we were always reluctant to assume, as many previous post-occupancy sociologies of the highrise have, that the most valuable and truthful knowledge about the highrise belongs to that subject variously labelled  ‘resident’, ‘tenant’, ‘user’, ‘occupant’. This commitment did not only mean that we took into view other humans associated with the highrises – policy makers, maintenance people, etc. – but also aspects of the building itself (both inside the flats and outside), as well as discourses about the building (translations, inscriptions, plans, policy documents).

6. ‘Show us your home, enacted. A final adjustment made to the SUYH method was to attempt, at appropriate opportunities in the home tour, to ask residents to engage in ‘enactments’: for example, ‘show me (and talk me through) how you do your washing’; ‘show me how you cook’; ‘show me what you do with your rubbish’, ‘show me your view’. We hoped this kind of request would subsidise a free-reign tour (as the tenant wants to where the tenant wants, with minimum intervention on our part) with a more ‘scripted’ tour that would enable us to see resident and home in action. In short, it could introduce moments in the tour that replicated somewhat the kind of data one would get from observational techniques of the house/householder in everyday life. We hoped that this would allow finer grained observation and so questioning about the things in the flat. The enactment we assumed might also bring other background things into view for questioning: plugs, etc..

Ethics and Questions asked

The lay descriptions and information sheets offered to residents, and the kinds of questions and prompts used are detailed here [1].

Cited readings and other influences

ARNOLD, J. E. and GRAESCH, A. P. (2002) Space, time and activities in the everyday lives of working families: An ethnoarchaeological approach. UCLA Centre on Everyday Lives of Families. http://www.celf.ucla.edu/pdf/celf02-arnoldgraesch.pdf

BRAND, S. (1995) How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. London: Penguin.

BUCHLI, V. and LUCAS, G. (eds) (2001) Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London: Routledge.

CALLON, M. (2006) What does it mean to say that economics is performative? Papiers de Recherches du CSI – CSI Working Papers Series, Number 005. Centre de Sociologie de Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris.

CHUA, B-H. (1997) Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, London: Routledge.

CIERAAD, I. (1999) ‘Introduction: anthropology at home’ in I. Cieraad, (Ed.) At home: an anthropology of domestic space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

COLLIER, J. and COLLIER, M. (1986) Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CROUCH, D. 2003 Spacing, performing, and becoming: tangles in the mundane, Environment and Planning A 35(11) 1945 – 1960.

HARRIS, S. and BERKE, D. (1997) Architecture of the everyday. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

HASSAN, R. (1977) Families in Flats: A Study of Low Income Families in Public Housing, Singapore: Singapore University Press.

HILL, J. (2003) Actions of architecture: Architects and creative users. London: Routledge

JEPHCOTT, P. (1971) Homes in High Flats: Some of the Human Problems Involved in Multi-Storey Housing. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

LATOUR, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

LATOUR, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: University Press.LAW, J. (1989) Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion, in: W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. J. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 111-134, London and Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

LAW, J., and M. CALLON (1992) The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change, in: W. E. Bijker, and J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society, pp. 290-308, Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press.

MILLER, D. (1988) ‘Appropriating the state on the council estate’, Man (NS), 23, pp. 353-372.

OCHS, E., GRAESCH, A.P., MITTMAN, A., BRADBURY, T., REPETTI, R. (2004) Video Ethnography and Ethnoarchaeological Tracking.

UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 31.

PINK, S. (2007) The sensory home as a site of consumption: Everyday Laundry practices and the production of gender, in (Eds) Casey, E. and Martens, L. Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life. Ashgate Publishing.

RUSSELL, S., and R. WILLIAMS (2002) Social Shaping of Technology: Frameworks, Findings and Implications for Policy with Glossary of Social Shaping Concepts, in: K. H. Sorensen, and R. Williams (Eds.), Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy: Concepts, Spaces and Tools, pp. 37-132, Cheltenham UK and Northampton Mass: Edward Elgar.