Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino - Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life

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Smart homes, as an image, feel familiar yet modern. After decades of science fiction films, the Jetsons and next-generation appliances claiming to solve all our domestic issues, the use of smart homes has aligned itself with our collective expectations. Technology has seemingly changed the ways in which we entertain ourselves and others; we eat, restore ourselves, and keep ourselves healthy.

Our commonly developed ideas of home interactions are being disrupted by social media, connected non-screen-based devices (the Internet of Things), e-commerce, the so-called gig economy, artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, blockchain, virtual reality, Big Data, and other software-enabled trends. Middle class and affluent households can now improve their homes with a plethora of new services: controllable plugs, light bulbs that change color on demand, or shopping list or playlist controlled by voice or with a mobile app.

These developments have taken place in the last 5 years but reflect a return in using the home as an accelerator of technology ideas. It would be easy to think of our condition as totally modern in the sense that no one else in time could be living like this, but the resulting behaviors, services, and spaces we are imagining, designing, and prototyping in the labs and research departments of today were sometimes already part of our daily lives more than 100 years ago. Ironically, the concept of the smart home is helping us free ourselves from home-centric economic dynamics. We are slowly reconnecting with communities of small, local entrepreneurship and city-based economies and behaviors of the pre-industrial era.

The middle class home in its current shape in the west hasnt changed since the late 1800s. The home would move its layout really only three times in the past hundred years: the first time to introduce a dedicated bathroom, then separate bedrooms, and finally to point the furniture toward the television.

This is telling of a change in time spent with others in the home. Once the basics of Maslows pyramid of needs had been resolved and the sanitation of a home was good enough to prevent pest and disease, the next thing to do was to find ways for the home to offer us opportunities for self-fulfillment, creativity, and explorationespecially with new industrialized products as assistants instead of the people we had relied on for so long.

Its layout, what we buy, and where we put it is not only an individual decision nor the result of our personal taste and circumstances. Our homes and how we live in them is the result of the violent intrusion of science, welfare laws, and the industrial and economic needs of the late nineteenth century. Technology, design, architecture, and interior design became tools to help us swallow the pill of social and economic change. In 2017, 80% of Unilevers customers are women, and this is not by accident. Since the home economics movement, the feminist movement, and the post-war boom, the womens place was deliberately designed to be in the home rather than at work or in the city.

Smart homes, as an identifiable term, came to life as smart house in a 1984 research consortium financed by the US government and spear-headed by the National Association of Home Builders. The ideas explored by this consortium of corporations in the built environment were very close to what would be commercially available in 2017 but without imagining the subtle but important social and economic changes that the internet would bring. This blinkered view would last throughout the 1980s and 1990s where an era sometimes called domotics and often called home automation would stagnate, stuck in the market of the rich and the deluded. Building smart systems management felt like a bigger opportunity for those technologists at the time than to address the difficult home market.

In 2017, we have managed in less than 20 years to change the rhetoric of the smart home and take it out of its industrial context to weave a new narrative. In this book we will explore those changes to shed light on the smart home of today and identify exactly where real innovation lies. We will look at how homes have changed to adapt to healthier living conditions; new industrial-centric economies; innovation in lighting, heating, and communication; and how the home has contributed to help build industries outside of its white picket fence.

We will see throughout each chapter how these scientific, industrial, and social dynamics influenced households of the day and how they shape todays view of technology as helpful. We will look at the role of the design sector and advertising in creating a story of the home as a place where identity, care, and creativity could be expressed. We will identify trends in how companies worked with these sectors to control and dictate to consumers what ambitions they should aspire to have and how technology could help them get there.