The Planetary Household
A theory and design research workshop on reimagining the pandemic household as a world
This workshop examined the pandemic household as both a scientific and ontological project. We theorized and interrogated in words and drawings containment and interiorization, as well as the idea to design the house as an inhabitable digestive machine of ingestion and excretion.
In revising how we navigate territoriality throughout the pandemic, from inside to outside, renewed protocols to leave and enter the house, or any space—have arisen. The process of departure and reentry expanded the threshold of the door to an elongated and operational space of decontamination steps. The door became an airlock, necessitated to enter the unfriendly and unforgiving void of a foreign planet outside. Our households were spaceships, while urbanity transformed into a constellation of demarcated “essential” locations, while everything else was obscured in a newly formed mental desert. The outside turned to a vast array of disconnected bedrooms, microcosms that come together in an abstract digital space, physically enabled by data farms.
In the workshop, we looked at the drawings of British cartoonist William Heath Robinson and his concepts of mechanization and absurdity as visually narrated in his contraptive domestic machines. Robinson’s Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 1934 and his satire of concepts of efficiency, automation and liberating labor-saving devices, have become symbols of suburban modernity inside the home following World War II. Paradoxically, the absurdity that Robinson encapsulated almost a century ago reflected the massive delirium of pandemic domestic enclosure during the spring of 2020. Parallel to Robinson, we examined contemporary domestic living machines including Samsung’s Ballie ball robot, IKEA’s Growroom, Aereco’s Smart Ventilation System and Philips Microbial Home Kitchen. The objective was to hack Robinson’s devices and reinvent the house -in parts- as a world of metabolism and digestion. We discussed and critiqued the idealization of comfort, the fear of disease, the obsession for biocontrol and operated as a collective to assemble a catalog and an archive of pandemic narratives and drawings for the hysteria of containment.
