Remarkable Wireless Home Networking

This paper argues that wireless home networking has been critically underexamined and yet is an infrastructure that has come to configure everyday life. This design research inquiry offers a contemporary account of the domesticated Internet, with specific attention to the participants’ mundane practices (configurations, living with, and maintenance) of WiFi. Six rented households were remotely engaged through probe activities and three bespoke WiFi meters that allowed participants to measure otherwise invisible qualities of the network. It is found that while wireless opens the possibility of a home network for people who do not own their homes, the complex invisible dynamics of these networks are too inscrutable for even simple fixes to be made. The discussion closes with a question: if the services and infrastructures of the home become further entangled in the wireless network, might the problem of WiFi maintenance become an existential threat to a functioning home?