We report on a design research inquiry aimed at understanding and exploring the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace and choose to live within collective houses and mobile vehicles as their homes. A goal of our work is to inquire into how such lived alternatives of 'home' can take a step toward broadening possibilities for conceptualizing 'domestic' technology and provoking questions around how it might be critiqued, imagined, and designed. We offer a brief overview of our ongoing research with a sample of collective and mobile dwellers, and propose three themes that extend prior generative work in this area: critique through living, taking time to adapt, and the transitional home. We use these themes in a design-led approach to propose six fictional future technology concepts that aim to (i) critically reflect on and provoke questions about commitments in current mainstream visions of domestic technology and (ii) explore new possibilities for engaging with the material, social, and technological conditions shaping the lives of our collective and mobile dweller participants. We conclude with a reflection on our work, its limitations, and opportunities it suggests for future research and practice.

The home has been a major focus of the HCI community for over two decades. Despite this body of research, nascent works have argued that HCI's characterization of 'the home' remains narrow and requires more diverse accounts of domestic configurations. Our work contributes to this area through a four-month ethnography of three collective homes in Vancouver, Canada. Collective homes represent an alternative housing model that offers agency to individual members and the collective group by sharing values, resources, labour, space and memory. Our paper offers two contributions. First, we offer an in-depth design ethnography of three collective homes, attending to the values, ownership models, practices, and everyday interactions observed in the ongoing making of these domestic settings. Second, we interpret and synthesize our findings to provide new opportunities for expanding the way we conceptualize and design for 'the home' in HCI.