Home Capability Boundaries and Functional Allocation: A Framework for Comparing Household Arrangements

Homes are often described by their rooms, appliances, and domestic services, although a household also operates through capabilities distributed across residents, buildings, neighborhoods, enterprises, institutions, and infrastructure. This paper proposes Home Architecture Science (HAS) as a bounded method for analyzing that allocation. For a specified household, function, context, and time, the method maps current capability and responsibility, reconstructs the reasons for their present placement, generates candidate internal, shared, external, and time-varying alternatives, and compares them against habitation, safety, consent, affordability, access, resilience, and environmental requirements. A formal decision frame distinguishes capability from permission and technical feasibility from desirability. Two schematic applications, laundry and residential energy flexibility, illustrate the method without reporting measured outcomes. The contribution is a research architecture and a set of testable propositions, not a validated optimization law or evidence that increased domestic production is generally beneficial. The manuscript identifies the measurements and comparisons needed to test whether a revised home boundary improves outcomes in a particular setting. The contribution is a proposed integration of the author’s originating Home Architecture Science specification, the AS-D01 reassessment interface, and neighboring work on housing, household production, shared arrangements, building energy, care, and digital risk. The laundry and energy applications are schematic. No original household dataset, measured intervention, controlled comparison, validated digital twin, demonstrated Home Architecture Science deployment, cross-domain replication, universal allocation law, or demonstrated economic benefit is reported. The accompanying Supporting Constitutional and Scientific Record v0.1 preserves claim status, citation roles, counterexamples, objections, limitations, and provenance. Substantial AI assistance in synthesis, drafting, notation, citation reconciliation, and editorial restructuring is disclosed; it is not independent review or scientific validation.