Anticipating the Dynamic Effects of the Learning Smart Home

Everyday domestic life will inevitably change in the future, as smart homes–alongside their inhabitants–will increasingly be able to learn over time. The purpose of my PhD research is to explore what it could look like if learning smart home technologies (SHTs) become integrated into the future domestic everyday. More specifically, I seek to study what role these technologies and their designers could, would, and should play in affecting households’ domestic lives. Existing literature on this topic focuses on making algorithms understandable (XAI) and offering users more control over how their homes learn. So far, most of these efforts have been reactive, analyzing and responding after these technologies have already entered everyday domestic life. This project, however, adopts a more dynamic and anticipatory approach. This means investigating how these learning technologies interact with the dynamics of the domestic–often unpredictable–everyday.