Initial thoughts

The concept of the smart home has been around for some time. Spectacularly toyed around with in Science fiction literature (Bradbury, Ballard) and realised on a much more mundane level by several telecoms and IT companies, there is something about the idea of a reactive home and intelligent products that somehow captures the public imagination. Heretofore control of products has been through a conscious action on the part of the user. A desire leading to an interaction: a pushing of a button, a twisting of a dial, a pulling of a lever. This in turn leads to an effect, the operation of the product, satisfying the original desire.

What if the products that surround us could pre-empt these desires? If they could react to moods or states autonomously. Based in the home, the potential for these smart environments to create and to play a part in complex, rich, challenging and provocative narratives becomes enormously appealing.

In Science fiction we can jump forward in time experiencing complex concepts and ideas through the eyes of a protagonist, these can engage and challenge our expectations and also visualise our hopes and fears. Design can offer a similar experience but rather than projecting into the far future focus on a alternative now or very near future. Often depictions of the smart home are a ground up undertaking. A systematic re-building of the home incorporating all the wires and other technologies necessary to demonstrate its capabilities. This may be a growing trend in some new homes with developers pre-empting our potential desire for futuristic domestic lifestyles but for those with existing homes and infrastructures the experience of to this technology might be more difficult to access. It is unlikely that we would jump directly from a non-smart home directly into a fully sensitised, reactive environment such as Ballard’s Psychotropic house. Technology enters our lives usually through small iterations and advances on what has gone before. In this way we know what to expect, we can imagine what it would be like to move forward from an analogue television to a digital one, to replace the vinyl music collection with MP3s. The benefits are clear and the experience not too dissimilar from what went before.

Embracing a profoundly new technologically mediated domestic product or environment then would be unlikely. The benefits too unclear for the substantial financial outlay its first application would incur.

More likely would be a gradual shift towards a reactive environment over time, products being the first recipients of semi-intelligent interaction. This is already happening on a small scale with some prototype televisions being exhibited at recent technology expos and the Sony Bravia WE5 already on the market with inbuilt movement detector being used to automatically turn the TV picture if no presence is detected in the room.

Currently “intelligent” rooms and products mostly detect just the presence of a person. Sony’s future proposal to differentiate between adults and children automatically switching on parental controls if a child was viewing the set starts to introduce a qualitative element. The potential for this to go much further with the application of face recognition, thermal imaging and expression monitoring is obvious. The design challenge here is to explore how this might happen. How might products and services react to humans if they were aware of their mood.