Cheaper, Embedded and Invisible

Abstract

From the home of the future to the realities of the home of the late 1990s, there was a gap. The Smart House project wasn't public enough to drive the “smart” revolution yet, but research departments in both academia and large consumer goods companies were. Their impact would start to bring to life examples of connected domestic product experiences that we still hold as examples of the “smart home.” Driven by the early days of the internet and its amazing possibilities, computer scientists everywhere started to think about what other devices, other than computers, would be or could be influenced, controlled, or changed by networked information structures. This pre-supposes that a technically enabled approach is best to create the products of the future, but as we saw, the problems to solve in a domestic landscape do tend to stay the same regardless of the technical advancements. There is, in short, a lack of imagination around the home space in computing circles that is a reflection not only of the people working on these new advancements but of their biases and preconceived ideas of what happens at home.