Today’s (2019) Smart Home offering is very politically correct, every gadget needs to look as if it was “Designed in California”. It needs to blend perfectly with your furniture and it must offer “analytics” not to mention an App in you smartphone.
I get it’s super exciting to see the temperature sway in your living room in real time while you are bored at the office and that the reported savings your smart appliance provided with its smart recommendations (which are partially true) will be a great conversation point, I know you’ll feel good about that light automatically changing its color when you come home after spending more on that bulb than you’d like to admit but… seriously, we can do better than that.
The current Problem : The common assumption is that throwing some sensors and actuators plus a couple of “ideas” to users, we’ll come up with awesome use cases and by doing so the revolution of smart homes will be bootstrapped.
In theory it is not a bad idea, I’m sure other industries have pulled a similar trick, the issue is that it is marketed as a plug and play solution. A real plug and play looks like a Gaming console that you connect and start playing with immediately after. I know a lot of people that have invested in smart gateways/lights or sensors just to open the box once and then abandon it because there is really no path towards solving a particular problem. To put it in perspective, imagine that IKEA sold exclusively a box with all the joints and screws and legs to assemble “something” for your house. I guess you could build the chair of your dreams but that is far from a straight path to solve a problem that you might have today and right now.
My proposal is to focus on problems or at least interesting projects first, technology second. As an engineer this is kind of saying that I’m going to the backseat. As a product designer I say: let’s come up with one hundred awesome ideas that demonstrate that you can have awesome home gadgets (or I’ll eat my hat). And just then, let’s start talking about implementation. If future doesn’t come, let’s bring it in =).
Ricardo Cid's Blog 