Different faces of smart homes
Popular smart home adverts typically depict life in a comfortable, automated home: a single click on an app and the lights go out, the temperature adjusts and the vacuum cleaner cleans the floor itself. However, research from the SMARTUP team shows that the concept of a smart home is much more complex. It's not just about technology, but also about how we shape our social relationships, the division of house chores, and access to privacy.
Four categories of smart homes
The SMARTUP team has conducted a number of analyses. One of them distinguishes four visions of smart homes, each with its own values and priorities is among them:
- Inclusive home – focused on equality and accessibility, meeting the needs of various user groups, including the elderly and people with disabilities.
- Bio-home – combining technology with nature, supporting residents' health and caring for the environment, for example, through air quality monitoring systems and the use of renewable energy sources.
- Autonomous home – based on automation and resource sharing, where residents can create communities that manage technologies independently of large corporations.
- Augmented home – where everyday life intertwines with virtual and augmented reality, and the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds become increasingly fluid.
Each of these categories demonstrates that a smart home can be designed in different ways, depending on the values we consider crucial.
Between comfort and control
The development of smart homes brings not only benefits but also challenges. Technologies designed to make life easier can also be used for surveillance – for example, monitoring energy consumption or controlling household behaviour. In the background, questions about privacy and power arise: who has access to the data generated in our homes, and how will it be used? How we imagine the smart home says a lot about our society and what we fear and expect from technology.
Science that inspires questions about the future
The SMARTUP project is being implemented in several European countries, and its Polish part is led by Prof. Dorota Golańska from the University of Lodz. Researchers are trying to understand how smart technologies impact everyday life – not only technically, but also socially and culturally.
The podcast is an opportunity to reflect on what we want our homes to look like in the future. Will they be primarily comfortable? Or will they become places where technology supports equality, ecology and safety?
Interview given as part of the SMARTUP project financed by the National Science Centre under the CHANSE programme [grant number: 2021/03/Y/HS6/00250].
mgr Bartosz Hamarowski (the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, University of Lodz) is a cultural expert, cognitive scientist and a data analyst by education. He is currently finalising his doctoral dissertation in cognitive humanities and conducting research on the dynamics of socio-political conflicts in the social media space. In the SMARTUP project, he is responsible for analysing artistic, architectural and pop-cultural representations of smart homes.
Edit: Małgorzata Jasińska and Michał Gruda (Centre for External Relations and Social Responsibility of the University, University of Lodz)
