Who uses smart home technologies? Representations of users by the smart home industry
Tom Hargreaves, Charlie Wilson, Richard Hauxwell‐Baldwin · UEA Digital Repository (University of East Anglia) · 2013
Through ambient intelligence and automated control systems, smart homes have been presented as a key means by which households can optimize their use of energy-consuming appliances in order to save energy and money. Whilst the adoption of smart home technologies and their appropriation within everyday domestic lives is critical to the overall success of smart homes, to date visions of smart homes have been strongly driven by technology push and have not been based on a clear understanding of user-centric benefits, nor have users been engaged with in any clear or systematic way. There is thus an important need to understand how smart home users are being represented and understood within these technology-driven visions. The paper presents the results of a content analysis of industry-produced smart home marketing materials that focussed on representations of the technology itself, its users, and of technology-user interactions. The content analysis was based on a coding template derived from a systematic review of the academic literature on smart homes and their users. Key findings from the content analysis include: • differences in opinion around whether user practices are predominantly stable, routine and predictable or involve substantial variability and unpredictability; • consensus around the modular development of smart homes within existing homes through additional and integrated (rather than replacement) technologies; • a widespread lack of attention to within household interactions and the possibility of multiple users with divergent technology preferences; • an implicit assumption that user decision-making is mainly rational, centred on information-processing; • strong consensus on the design of user interfaces as mobile, familiar, intuitive, and visible devices; • ambiguity regarding the potential tension between control and empowerment as opposed to automation. The paper concludes that industry visions of smart homes are more convergent than academic research suggests, particularly around issues of user decisions and interaction, trust and confidentiality, and control and automation.