Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is part of an ongoing project, Honey, I’m Home, which began as a response to rethinking the architecture of degrowth. The GDP was exhibited at the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2019.
The GDP is a fictional prototype for collectivising domestic labour. 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.
Featured in Dezeen and Wallpaper*.
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 behaviour. As the base unit of our current socio-economic system, the nuclear family and its home, is a key starting point when trying to rethink the way we live together.
Honey, I’m Home looks at the props found in our homes, specifically those designed for domestic labour. These taylorist tools are often designed for solo use, from the lawnmower to the microwave, to the hoover. These tools are also mostly designed to be used privately, and are therefore complicit in the patriarchal system of unpaid reproductive work that happens behind the scenes. Honey, I’m Home seeks to challenge the rituals that surround these props by making simple tweaks to traditional domestic spaces and objects. The hoover is an example of a scale that could be changed in order to start changing our culture around sharing and reproductive labour.
The rise of consumerism, alongside the privatisation of domestic utilities (for example water and gas connected to personal washing machines and stoves), collided at a critical point where our culture moved towards private domestic work. We have a history of shared kitchens, shared laundrettes and public bath houses as proud civic monuments, which the project seeks to reference and learn from. In order to imagine how these small transitions affect larger change, the hoover is set within a fictional narrative presenting the three-person hoover as a discarded idea from 1919 (when the original domestic hoover took its current form). The project asks us to imagine how we could now be living, had we followed an alternative trajectory.