House proud: the Parnells at rest. Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian
Clear-minded readers may remember that about a year ago, a family decided to become subjects of a real Big Brother house, by allowing themselves to be monitored for research purposes.
The Parnell family, from Sheffield, spent six months being monitored by a mixture of technologies from two different universities. What we described as "intensive technical spying" via RFID chips, the family's movements inside the house were tracked in order to help understand the way we use our homes.
Well, the results are in, and now the researchers are asking for more help:
Results of the study, collected and analysed by a team at Nottingham University's School of the Built Environment, showed that the den in the basement, the open-plan kitchen and the balcony hot-tub were all popular, while the dining room and the study were hardly used. The findings provide a huge wealth of data that will help to guide 21st century house building.
But now the researchers are looking to broaden the research to cover a much larger cross-section of the population, with the help of a short online questionnaire which can be found at: nottingham.ac.uk/projectlife
Personally, I'll be telling them that I've spent an inordinate time in the study this weekend (fiddling about after the processor on my desktop PC decided to give up the ghost): but I'm sure if I had a balcony hot-tub, I'd spend plenty of time using that instead.
