Honey I'm Home

Edit is a feminist design collective, focusing on the enduring biases and hierarchies embedded into the environments surrounding us. Honey I’m Home questions the architectural qualities of domestic spaces through the critique of their foundations: the nuclear family. The floor plan of a typical house can be read as a diagram of familial and gendered power relations through the simple demarcation of space. This spatialised diagram of power structures has been naturalised to the point that it is rarely interrogated properly, and duplicated without concern for its contribution to the current housing and social crisis. In today’s context, to inhabit a family home results in the acceptance of conforming to both the conditions of being a family, and the constitution of a financial unit, complicitly performing within the orders of private property. The family is a reproductive force of capitalist relations, maintaining the dominance of masculinity, the naturalization of housework, and conditioning children for a competitive labor market.

Edit was invited by the Oslo Architecture Triennale to present a prototype developed as part of Honey I’m Home. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a fictional prototype for collectivizing domestic labor. As an alternative to the capitalist assumption that housework is most efficient when performed individually, the GDP is a device that can be used only by three people. The project explores the domestic realm as a space of performance (with associated performative rituals), and more importantly as a political project, rather than a space that has organically grown out of an innate, natural human behavior. Honey, I’m Home seeks to challenge the rituals that surround these props by making simple tweaks to traditional domestic spaces and objects. The vacuum is an example of a scale that could be changed in order to start changing our culture around sharing and reproductive labor. The project asks us to imagine how we could now be living, had we followed an alternative trajectory.