Think about the home you grew up in. Did the aroma from your mother’s freshly baked cookies greet you? Or the stale smell of an empty house? Maybe you owned a house key to let yourself in while your parents were at work? Perhaps you learned to pull the door a certain way while unlocking it because your copied key was cut slightly wrong? Whether you entered a dark, quiet and empty house or your mother stayed home toiling over household duties, your house was probably pretty “dumb”. Comfortable, but dumb. Never learning your preferred ambient temperature or restocking milk for your Dinky Donuts. Never offering your exhausted mother a helping hand. Never letting you know where the remote control is, causing you to always miss the first few minutes of Gilligan’s Island.
Chances are that your Generation Z children’s homelife isn’t that much different. The food brands might have changed, the screens look different – handheld rather than a clunky big box in the corner. But while our homes look the same, our they are silently evolving in very distinct ways. The evolutionary level of the house your child is growing up in might be similar to that of a single cell organism with Amazon’s Echo or Google Home signalling its only sign of life. But their own children’s homes could mimic intelligent life at an almost uncanny level – at least according to today’s expectations. While the thought that our homes become a nervous system anticipating our every behavior and habit might creep out most of us, our grandchildren might grow up expecting their windows and walls to seamlessly adapt to their every personal need and desire.
As we’re moving deeper into the era of the Internet of Things, our homes are queitly becoming smart and connected. Our lives are about to get very convenient. But there’s a catch. A customized homelife is operated through, and paid for, by the behavioral data we generate in our own sanctuaries. This data has value far beyond our immediate surroundings.
I was recently interviewed in this episode of The Home of the Future to help explore this aspect of smart homes and data privacy. The media channel Vox has developed a fully connected home in Austin. Make sure to also watch the other episodes of this fascinating series!
So what do you think? Would you trade certain aspects of your homelife for technology that offers convenience and comfort at a lower cost? A survey I did a few years ago with a technology company to investigate this particular question revealed that some of you will make this trade-off and some of you won’t. Most of you were unsure about where the line between privacy and convenience should be drawn. Where you live, your gender and to an extent your generation all play a part here. Stay tuned as we will write more detailed about these findings in a later post!