Smart homes: domestic futurity as Infrastructure

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the way that the Brookfield Residential (BR) Smart Home constructs domestic futurity, or a set of cultural practices and meanings pertaining to a mediated, technologically-advanced home and homelife. The BR Smart Home is a new mass-market smart domestic product produced in partnership with retail and logistics hegemon, Amazon. The Smart Home offers customizable, luxury smart living, to include the traditional (stainless steel appliances, a butler’s pantry) and the transitional (a drone heliopad, a new ‘Drop Zone’ room for Amazon and other deliveries). As an exemplar of mass-market smart home technology, the Smart Home communicates the durability of traditional conceptions of domesticity in the smart home age. At the same time, the BR Smart Home reveals the material shifts in domestic spaces goaded by new technological and economic developments. The Smart Homes’ changing spatial configurations reflect upon and intensify infrastructures that fortify divisions between the Smart Homeowners and marginalized others. Drawing on fieldwork completed at several BR Smart Homes, I argue that domestic futurity is a form of infrastructure that is (1) so well distributed as to be frequently hidden, (2) agential and transitional, and (3) subject to cultural transformation while simultaneously upholding residues of traditional domesticity.