A new paper, 'Software, Obects and Home Space', just finished and submitted to a journal for review. The draft is available as a NIRSA Working Paper. Comments and criticism are welcome.










Software, Objects and Home Space

Martin Dodge, University of Manchester
Rob Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Abstract
Through a series of interrelated developments, software is imbuing everyday objects with capacities that allow them to do additional and new types of work. On the one hand, objects are remade and recast through interconnecting circuits of software that makes them machine-readable. On the other, objects are gaining calculative capacities and awareness of their environment that allow them to conduct their own work, with only intermittent human oversight, as part of diverse actant-networks. In the first part of the paper we examine the relationship between objects and software in detail, constructing a taxonomy of new types of coded objects. In the second part we explore how the technicity of coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces.