Hiding in Plain Sight: Understanding the Everyday Practices and Challenges of Car Dwellers

TL;DR

This paper explores the everyday practices, challenges, and identity negotiations of car dwellers, emphasizing their infrastructuring work and implications for HCI research and technology design.

Contribution

It provides a qualitative analysis of car dwellers' experiences, highlighting their infrastructuring strategies and identity negotiations, addressing a gap in HCI research on vehicle dwelling as housing insecurity.

Findings

Car dwellers develop unique infrastructuring practices to manage daily life.

Experiences of car dwellers are between homelessness and nomadism.

Infrastructural competence influences identity formation.

Abstract

Vehicle dwelling has increased significantly in recent years. While HCI research has explored vehicle dwelling through the lens of digital nomadism and vanlife, it has largely overlooked the complexities of vehicle dwelling as a form of housing insecurity, as well as the unique constraints of living in smaller vehicles. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of posts and comments from an online community, we examine car dwellers' infrastructuring work to manage daily life under social, spatial, and infrastructural constraints. We further explore the motivations and identity negotiations of car dwellers, whose experiences fall between homelessness and nomadism, and highlight how developing infrastructural competence can shape identity. We discuss implications for future HCI research on mobility and dwelling under conditions of uneven access to infrastructure and provide design recommendations for technologies that better account for car dwellers' diverse needs, circumstances, and identities.