Swan, Taylor, and Harper discuss the way families classify objects, with a particular focus on clutter. They note that clutter is difficult to define:

We have come to think of clutter as something that is understood in relation to other categories--that is, it is made up of things that are not easily classed by their unique features but rather by virtue of falling outside of other categories of things. In other words, clutter is defined not by what it is, but in part by what it is not. One might say that clutter is a residual category.

The authors use ethnographic techniques from an ongoing study of family life. Three families are studied in their approach to clutter. The authors note that all three families they observed have a system for hiding clutter from view.

This paper is a creative approach to a difficult task within computing. How do you classify things that are ambiguous? In order to approach this, they cite Emile Durkheim’s book [1]. Thus, it is not surprising that the authors note that “our sites of clutter demark the boundaries between structured and unstructured, ordered and disordered, sacred and profane.”

Carrying these observations over to computing in a home environment, the authors note:

In designing technologies for uncertainty, dirty technologies where we are able to (re)produce our ideas of place, time and again, we thus have some basic tenets. The possibility of building technologies for ambiguity, instability, concealment and disinterest, and to be treated casually, hopefully gives us a position from which to rethink our design for homes that is somehow more true to how we live in them.

Swan, Taylor, and Harper step outside the usual technology-focused and measurement-based methods to reach their conclusions. The paper is worth reading for its approach to clutter and also as a creative approach within human-computer interaction (HCI) for merging ethnographic analysis with the sociology of religion.