The future that never was
Why the smart home failed and how we can fix it
The smart home is the future that never was. We built systems that let people control their coffee maker, while what they really wanted was to control their lives.No wonder it never took off.
For smart homes to become a mass market phenomenon, they will have to seamlessly adapt to our daily lives. But while human behaviour is predictable in broad strokes, it is completely random in the details. So how do we create a system that makes sense of it all?
At a glance, the last 20 Tuesdays of your life were identical. You got up in the morning, made breakfast, went to work, came home, ate dinner, watched tv and went to bed around midnight. Utterly predictable.
Yet once you delve into the details, randomness appears. This morning you had a coffee and an omelet, last week you grabbed a slice of pizza on the way out. Some Tuesdays you get home early, others late. Dinner is eaten in the kitchen, in front of the tv, at your desk or in bed. Occasionally you go for a run, other days you sit in bed with a takeout. There’s no clear pattern.
This is the key challenge for the intelligent home. A useful smart home needs to adapt and provide value without programming and a long getting-to-know-you period. It needs to improve your life from the moment it is installed and it can’t fail. The lights can only turn on randomly so many times before you go back to the light switch.
Successful smart home providers will have to identify the minute signals of human behaviour that lets the system reliably predict need. For the majority of people, late night plus liqour cabinet opened plus rainy Saturday morning equals sleeping in. It’s a banal example, but by analysing large data sets of human behavioural patterns we can work on creating models of what signals correlate with what behaviour in less obvious circumstances than a drunken night on the town.
This leaves us with a chicken-and-egg situation. To gather the data needed to create these models, we need our solutions to be part of the homes and lives of many users, something we may only be able to do once we’ve created the models.
At Viva, we’ve decided that the solution is to start simple. Clear use cases with universal appeal that can be modelled using an heuristic approach. Things like intelligent heating or switches that turn off automatically if you leave an iron unattended. The value is easy to understand, but the experience can still be magical.
We’ll work our way to up the home that knows you better than yourself, but for now, we’ll start with something that improves your life a little bit.
