Participatory Design in Precarity: "Smart" Technologies for Tiny House Villages

In tiny house villages (THVs), land ownership, local regulations such as zoning, and management frameworks affect how formerly unhoused residents can leverage and augment their built infrastructure with ''smart'' technologies. These dynamics influence THV residents' lived experiences, creating both constraints and opportunities for deploying networked sensors in support of communication, physical security, and shared governance. Through a series of participatory design (PD) workshops and visits with residents of two villages, we identified how residents balance privacy and security concerns when considering Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor design and deployment. We find, for example, that residents impose constraints on designed sensors for the group's protection, such as a strict ban on camera-based visual or audio surveillance and a preference for local as opposed to cloud data storage. They also identify opportunities for diverse sensors and actuators to improve village accessibility and to alleviate resource sharing tensions. Meanwhile, differences between public and private land ownership directly impact the regulation and infrastructure possibilities for THVs, and historical and current zoning of land shapes the social problems that the community must navigate. Our findings deepen the CSCW research agenda by examining parameters for successful ''smart'' and data-driven technology interventions among low-resourced urban groups experiencing housing precarity and homelessness.