ABSTRACT
The Anima concept developed by Garrath Wilson, Val Mitchell and William Godfrey responded to the insight that when the routines and rhythms of family life become busy, then energy is likely to be used less efficiently in the home. 'Anima' proposed that digital technology could be used to create an ambient display of a home's heartbeat that would subtly signal to a family when life was stressful and encourage them to slow down. Design research studies in the home, therefore, have often tended to focus on understanding a known problem, for example, how to reduce the energy demand associated with the use of cold appliances in the home. An initial response to this complexity was to adopt a predominantly empathic response where insights into possible futures could be derived from in-depth yet unstructured immersion into the ethnographic research with the goal of discovering unexpected insights into home life to be reframed as design opportunities.
