Abstract
Smart home technologies with the ability to learn over time promise to adjust their actions to inhabitants’ unique preferences and circumstances. For example, by learning to anticipate their routines. However, these promises show frictions with the reality of everyday life, which is characterized by its complexity and unpredictability. These systems and their design can thus benefit from meaningful ways of eliciting reflections on potential challenges for integrating learning systems into everyday domestic contexts, both for the inhabitants of the home as for the technologies and their designers. For example, is there a risk that inhabitants’ everyday lives will reshape to accommodate the learning system’s preference for predictability and measurability? To this end, in this paper we build a designer’s interpretation on the Social Practice Imaginaries method as developed by Strengers et al. to create a set of diverse, plausible imaginaries for the year 2030. As a basis for these imaginaries, we have selected three social practices in a domestic context: waking up, doing groceries, and heating/cooling the home. For each practice, we create one imaginary in which the inhabitants’ routine is flawlessly supported by the learning system and one that features everyday crises of that routine. The resulting social practice imaginaries are then viewed through the perspective of the inhabitant, the learning system, and the designer. In doing so, we aim to enable designers and design researchers to uncover a diverse and dynamic set of implications the integration of these systems in everyday life pose.
Highlights
The smart home market is growing at a rapid pace
In this paper we have drawn on methods from future studies to address the challenge of proactively anticipating issues related to the integration of learning systems in the complex and unpredictable everyday domestic life
We have based our approach on social practice imaginaries as developed by Strengers et al (2019), centralizing the dynamic nature of social practices
Summary
The smart home market is growing at a rapid pace. This is exemplified by regular investments in this market by companies such as Amazon, with its recent acquisition of Ring (maker of internetconnected doorbells and cameras) or Google, with its investments in Nest (maker of smart thermostats, among other smart products) (Ali and Yusuf, 2018). Companies have been marketing smart home technologies (SHT) to mainstream consumers at increasingly declining price points Whereas before, they had only been embraced by a small affluent and tech-savvy group of early adopters, they are increasingly being implemented by a wider public (Ury et al, 2014). The presence of SHTs in the home can range from a single programmable smart light to a fully connected network of smart thermostats, security systems, Learning Systems versus Future Everyday cleaning appliances, and more. These SHTs, equipped with various kinds of sensors, have the ability to make decisions based on their specific context.
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