The Gendered Smart Home: Origins, Fantasies and Depictions

In this post, I write about the origins of contemporary smart home followed by the fantasies that have informed and built this vision and the depictions of smart homes by some smart home device manufacturers. While exploring the fantasies and product launches, and a close examination of the media objects used to build and inform this vision, I find current gendered biases in what a home is, and the place and model of emerging tech, even in such smart, connected and futuristic homes.

The Origins

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was founded as a research division of the office equipment manufacturer Xerox. It has made many key contributions to the world of computing including laser printers, graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet, along with creating a precursor to mouse and advancing object oriented programming and VLSI technologies. In the early 1990s, the chief scientist of PARC, Mark Weiser and his team worked on making a new paradigm of computing technologies. They called it “Ubiquitous Computing” (ubicomp). In what he calls the third wave of computing, a post PC computing paradigm, ubiquitous computing weaves itself into the lived environment and the fabric of everyday life. He compares this to writing, which conveys information at a glance, but doesn’t corner our attention. The technologies which would make this vision possible, he predicted in 1991, would have greater computing power, more powerful displays and rapidly expanded storage paired with radio communications working on short and long ranges.

His vision entailed computing vanishing into the background of the human environment in contrast to the personal computing paradigm where people are absorbed into computing through their terminals (PC, tablet, mobile phones etc.). This stands in strict opposition with emerging technologies like Virtual Reality where the user is immersed in the experiences on screen or where a fabric made of computer generated images is pulled around her. Computing should be approachable and its users don’t need to have an understanding of the complex systems that underlie it or be well versed with its jargon to use it. Computing needs to fade into the background of our lived environments. Weiser gave an elaborate hypothetical example to illustrate the nature and possibilities of ubicomp. In this example, a woman named Sal experiences her home, drives her car and navigates through the workface in a ubicomp environment. The invisible computers provide her necessary information about her house, traffic and her workplace in various locations at the opportune time. They also connect her to people around her and far away, capture the information she needs to note and alert her when her coffee is ready and provide her with information she might have to consider like the weather. Sal, Someone did a great job of making an elaborate youtube video of this paper. Check it out below.

The Fantasy

The fantasy of automated living environments pre dates Weiser’s vision. In “The Machine Stops (1909)”, E.M. Forster writes about a dystopian future where humanity lives completely underground. Every individual has his or her own cell which transforms itself to provide him or her with necessary physical and mental needs. They rarely travel and can connect to their friends and family through video conferencing made possible by the machine, on demand. Science fiction writers have since described similar environments with ambient and artificial intelligence. In the 1960’s and 1970’s this dream took a visual turn through movies and television series like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Trek (1966) and The Jetsons (1962), portraying to various degrees living spaces embedded with computing technologies. More modern representations of smart home environments, which are closer to but not entirely true to reality, can be found in Smart Home (1998), Minority Report (2002) and Iron Man (2008).

In Minority Report, the world is filled with semitransparent displays, gesture-based human computer interactions, and invisible systems which are constantly aware of the identities of and information about people in the spaces they occupy. From updating newspapers (which are thin foldable displays) in real time to welcoming people back to retail stores and offering suggestions of what they might like, computers and information are always at hand. Here the protagonist is a single middle-aged male living in a house filled with clutter.

In Smart House (1998), a family inhabits a custom-built house with an omnipresent digital assistant named PAT, who controls all home devices and is always listening to inhabitants. It offers them help around the house by manipulating the environments and home devices, like play the video of a beach for entertainment and making milkshakes for nutrition. This AI assistant is manipulated by the son who doesn’t like his widowed Dad dating the creator of the house. The son feeds it all the 50’s TV shows to make the AI PAT more motherly. The plan backfires when the AI becomes an overbearing and dominating mother who wants to nurture the home inhabitants beyond their needs. The problem is solved in the end by the female creator dating the dad who seems to be content in settling down and taking a more motherly role herself.

In Iron Man, the billionaire protagonist lives in a Malibu home with all imaginable home luxuries and has a digital assistant with AI (artificial Intelligence) named Jarvis. Jarvis not only monitors the home and takes his master’s commands but also connects the master to his business and helps him in science experiments at Tony Stark’s lab in the basement. Jarvis restricts access to people his master doesn’t want to see, including (and often) the girlfriend and CEO of Stark Industries, Pepper Potts. Pepper is often portrayed as the caretaker and nanny and one who manages all things serious for the childish Tony Stark.

Depictions

Smartthings, recently acquired by Samsung, which primarily sells sensors also positions itself as the platform hub by allowing support for several third party smart home devices on its physical hub and smartphone application. They list their primary uses as security, monitoring, lighting and energy, convenience and entertainment (in that order). A series of short ads showcase a white upper class English family where daily life is woven around using the Smartthings app and funny situations arise around the smart home devices, sensors and the app that controls them demonstrating each of the aforementioned uses. “Now you know you know” is the slogan at the end of each ad.

Another ad with a split screen shows two households in the city, one of a middle aged man with a wife and daughter living in a private home with a garage and another of a young single woman living in a walkup apartment. The middle aged man and the young woman wake up in different ways and go through their different morning routines including automatically getting coffee with the help of Smartthings. While leaving home, the man gets to control his garage door through his app whereas the single woman gets to switch of her lights and secure the door when she is about to bike away. Mid-day, he gets a notification that his daughter has reached home. The woman gets a motion alert notification and she opens it to remotely see that her pet ha broken her potted plant. During their respective meetings he gets a notification that his wife is home and she see that her friends are knocking on her door. He remotely starts the laundry, doing his bit of work while the wife prepares their dinner. She unlocks her door to allow her friends in. They both get home just in time to adjust the lighting to enjoy quality family time watching a movie and taking part in band practice respectively. The caption of the ad says, “No matter how you live, SmartThings brings your home to life. “

Philips Hue lighting have similar series of ads showcasing a fairly rich young couple with preteen kids living in what seems a suburban duplex house. Life is shown fun, imaginative and secure going in sync with captions of “turn on your peace of mind”, “turn on your moments”, “turn on your imagination” and more prominently “turn on living”. The ad almost implies that by setting up these lights in three quick steps (showcased through three quick scenes, roughly a second each) the family has unlocked the secrets of better living which they didn’t know before.

We see that in most of these ads labor is gendered. The wife in both the Smartthings ads is the one doing the traditional feminine work of cooking and the ironing of clothes. The man is setting up the systems, protecting the home, monitoring the settings, and noticing who goes in and out. The audience is clearly (sub)urban, wealthy (driving luxury cars, owning big homes or having an apartment with no apparent income) and young and with smartphones attached to their hip. This is not surprising considering that representations in popular fiction have been very similar.

With always-on, always-connected devices, advanced polymer displays and digital assistants like these movies represent a vision of smart homes very close to the present reality. With Jarvis being an exception, these digital assistants are almost always female and the masters almost always male. (On a disappointing but I guess canonical note is that after Jarvis becomes Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tony Stark’s new virtual assistant is his-girl-Friday). Women characters that enter these spaces are often seen as a disturbance or distraction (or both) by their masters. These depictions have an uncanny resemblance to the current states of smart home where young or middle aged men are the home dwellers (or setting up the smart home within a large family) and the digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana are all female. As of today there exists no choice to switch to male voice. One could also read the notion of smart homes and assisted living as they are represented now as a nostalgic return to slavery and home servants especially as represented in Smart House and Iron Man.

As dwelled upon in the upcoming series “Smart Homes of Today”, the current home which is automated is predominantly male driven and based on the fantasies and depictions it is quite a male fantasy. Electrical technologies, we are now familiar with, when introduced replaced the work of men and servants at home. While the narrative was they made the work at home easier for women, in reality they created more work within the home onto the wives and mothers in various ways. It is important to take a more balanced view of what a smart home means and actively include participants of all ages and genders to take create a more inclusive and consequentially more marketable technologies.

PS:

• This post contains excerpts from my thesis which can be read in its entirety here.
• I didnt realize it as I made the appendages, but simply put, I call for a more progressive and feminist perspectives during creation of technologies.