Melisa Duque book release: 'Designing Homeliness: Everyday practices of care'
Dr Melisa Duque has released her first book, ‘Designing Homeliness: Everyday Practices of Care’, published by Routledge. The book situates homeliness as a continual process of creating, maintaining, and restoring meanings and experiences of home whose research has been conducted in rural, regional, remote and metropolitan homes in Australia.
Designing Homeliness: Everyday Practices of Care proposes an interdisciplinary lens to investigate home. The book situates homeliness as a continual process of creating, maintaining, and restoring meanings and experiences of home. Melisa Duque draws from her design ethnographic practice with people using smart home lighting, gardening, jigsaw puzzles, and op-shopping to present everyday examples in dialogue with theoretical discussions, revealing the role of homeliness in generating wellbeing. The research projects featured in this book were conducted in rural, regional, remote, and metropolitan areas in Australia, at familiar and unfamiliar living sites, including people’s homes, a mental health hospital unit, a residential aged care facility, and a charity shop revaluing domestic things. This book offers conceptualisations and practical tools to advance home studies while engaging with broader discussions on ageing, wellbeing, and sustainability. Led by design research and social science analysis, this book will be of value for students, researchers, and practitioners at these intersections, including design, anthropology, and human geography.
“In Designing Homeliness, Melisa Duque presents a sophisticated understanding of forms of design that operate at ordinary sites of living. She dwells on them by articulating what it means - and could mean - to design homeliness in our troubled times. Interdisciplinary designers and researchers alike will find her proposals unsettling and full of possibilities.”
Andrea Botero, Aalto University, Finland