Augmented Home Inventories

Abstract

Normally, households comprise of people and their material possessions, where persons exercise exclusive agency. The digital augmentation of domestic environment transforms the constitution of households, populating them with new types of entities, namely connected and ‘smart’ objects/devices and distributed services. These new “players” operating within the household, are complex in nature, responsive, adaptive, blurring the given distinction between household members and their stuff, and evading a simplified classification. We consider the augmented home environment as an ecosystem which humans occupy among other interacting entities or parties which are actively affiliated to other networks and environments. Starting with the premise that a household inventory is one way to formally describe and define the household, we examine the contents and structure of traditional home inventories, and then elaborate on the potential evolution of the augmented home inventories as new types of interacting entities are introduced. Thus, we observe a shift from static and place-bound to dynamic classifications, allowing for diverse groupings of home-stuff. We contemplate on the possibility of integrating all parts of the household ecosystem into one unified classification and ontological system. We, also, acknowledge that the exponential growth of IoT will put increasing pressure for managing the huge volumes of data generated from connected households, on which an effective, meaningful, and socially compatible classification system is required. Finally, we highlight several challenges to the augmented home inventory.