At home: panoramas de nos vies domestiques : some ecological reflections

Domestic interiors are invested with a multitude of meanings; political, economic, social, cultural, psychological, and ecological among them. Between 2020 and 2022, the height of the Covid pandemic in Europe, the authors co-curated an exhibition—At Home: Panoramas de nos Vies Domestiques—for the 2022 St Etienne Design Biennale. The design exhibition explored those meanings, past, present, and future, and addressed the key themes challenging our domestic spaces in the early twenty-first century, including the climate emergency, housing inequality and the market, and the technology-fuelled erosion of privacy. This article will unpack the ways in which those themes and challenges interact with each other through the concept of ecology, understood in its broadest sense as a balanced relationship between human beings and the planet, and how, through the exhibits on display, designers have responded to them and suggested future directions.