Continuously Becoming Home

Speculative design installation exploring data, decarbonization, and domesticity, 2025

Continuously Becoming Home is an installation within the Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice, IT addressing the changing nature of architecture and domesticity at the intersection of artificial intelligence and decarbonization. It is affiliated with a talk given by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti at the Biennale Architettura 2025: GENS Public Programme.

What it means to live together with new and artificial natures in a moment defined by environmental crisis and the emergence of artificial general intelligence is yet unknown. Continuously-Becoming Home asks big questions about small domestic relationships and the design of our interior lives in a time of significant natural, technological, and social change.

The installation imagines the emerging 21st-century domestic landscape through the lens of eight domestic vignettes that explore the disposition of the home as a networked and systems-linked architecture. Three archival projects, shown alongside the vignettes, track the history of friction between design for human meaning, engineered technologies, and the physical and biological systems that inhabit it; the tension between energy efficiency and the human need for meaningful inefficiencies. The interactive designs for the vignette installations explore the strange, uncanny, and delightful rituals that emerge from the relationships between humans and non-humans living together. The interactions depict the multiple and layered relationships between human and home as a physical, technological, and biological construct, and between the home and the digitally-connected world beyond. This exhibition considers what it means to live together through the relationships of care and maintenance between humans, data, and environmental systems. In contrast to the invisible efficiencies and technocratic slickness of the “smart home,” the designed moments within the exhibition explore the meaningful inefficiencies and positive environmental impact of entangled systems of human life, data, and the biological world.

The exhibition re-visits essential questions, posed in a very different era, by the 1972 MoMA exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape about what drives design of the most fundamental aspects of daily domestic life in moments of significant social and environmental change. The title Continuously-Becoming Home refers to the emerging reality that our mundane home objects and the simple solidity of the shelter that frames them is called into question by the continuous streams of invisible information that flows through our world of increasingly responsive objects. The installation imagines a future for everyday design that relies upon entangled systems of data, emotion, and biological integration; in which the technological capacity that created our environmental crisis may be re-imagined as a pathway toward solving for different means, for healing and future life together.

The exhibition aims to communicate the urgent imperatives for the role of design practice in confronting environmental change and re-imagining what it means to be human in the 21st century. The installations and content that frames them are designed to be highly accessible to a general audience while maintaining a critical position on the technological and environmental imperatives that define the field of design today.