Designing Homeliness: Everyday Practices of Care

Designing Homeliness: Everyday Practices of Care proposes an interdisciplinary lens to investigate home. The book situates homeliness as continual processes of creating, maintaining and restoring meanings and experiences of home. Melisa Duque draws from her design ethnographic practice with people using smart home lighting, doing gardening, jigsaw puzzles, and op-shopping to present everyday examples in dialogue with theoretical discussions to reveal the role of homeliness in generating wellbeing. The research projects in this book were located in rural, regional, remote and metropolitan areas in Australia, at familiar and unfamiliar living sites, including people’s homes, a mental health hospital unit, a residential aged care facility, and at a charity shop revaluing domestic things. This book offers conceptualisations and practical tools to advance home studies while engaging with broader discussions on ageing, wellbeing and sustainability. Led by design research and social science analysis, this book will be of value for students, researchers and practitioners at these intersections, including design, anthropology, and human geography.