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This paper discusses inquiries into everyday life and domestic work in 1940s Sweden, with focus on the research initiatives conducted at the Hemmens forskningsinstitut (HFI, the Home Research Institute) from its establishment in 1944. The research into the conditions and tools for domestic work conducted there, has in previous historical research been approached from perspectives of the history of technology and consumption. I argue that the methods developed for researching and designing tools for domestic the HFI should be understood as early examples of user-centered design practices, such as user studies, ergonomics and iterative prototyping. I further propose that the user-centered and participatory design practices that later emerged in Scandinavia, in the 1960s and 1970s, owe much of their conceptual foundations to the early design practices developed at HFI. Histories of user-centered design have previously located the formation of these kinds of design practices to military contexts in the 1940s and 1950s, and histories of participatory designing often point to the 1960s and 1970s as the period in which collaborative designing emerged. Presenting the HFI’s design practices – which were based in feminist initiatives towards re-shaping everyday life – as central to the emergence of participatory and user-centered design sheds a different kind of light on contemporary design methods and on the conceptual spaces they open up towards. Reconsidering where designing takes place, and where ‘designers’ are found to be active, historically as well as in present-day practice, can re-form the histories we tell about what designing has been and project different trajectories of what design can become.