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Control of Smart Home Technologies
Abstract and Figures
In this chapter we focus on a specific theme that is central to research on SHTs: control. The potential benefits of SHTs are dependent on householders having more and finer-grained control over their appliances, homes and even their everyday lives and routines. Diving deeper into the qualitative interview material introduced in Chap. 5, we interrogate the many positive and negative ways in which control surfaces as an issue when householders use SHTs. We start by reviewing existing ideas of control in research on SHTs. We identify three distinct meanings of the term control: (i) ‘artefactual’ control which refers to the ability to use SHTs to control technologies and devices around the home; (ii) ‘perceptual’ control which refers to how SHTs impact upon householders’ feelings of control inside their home; and (iii) ‘relational’ control which refers to how SHTs affect householders’ control over their everyday lives, activities and relationships. We then explore how these distinct forms and meanings of control emerged and were experienced by householders in the SHT field trial. We also examine the inter-relationships between these distinct forms of control which can generate both positive and negative feedback loops impacting how householders use SHTs.
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... Users will not be able to directly control all these processes because of their sheer number and/or their complexity: they will lack sufficient resources to exercise continuous and detailed control of every process. A typical example is the smart home with several ongoing processes to control air conditioning, lighting, shading of windows, watering of plants, alarm functions etc. 8 The computers behind it may be invisible, but the processes they produce should be visible enough 9 to allow the user to be aware that they are functioning and check reliability or appropriateness. Other examples where people benefit from IT-driven processes are monitoring, advice and countermeasures in health care; notifications and warnings; monitoring logistics and adaptation of transporting systems and routes; and production surveillance. ...
Interaction-free usage (IfU) will be one of the quantitatively dominant forms of computer use in the future. In qualitative terms, this form of use will cover a wide range of applications, also software that supports communication and cooperation. Digital twins for cooperation and communication will be employed by individual users to maintain a variety of social networking activities. Generative AI will play a decisive role in this development, autonomously identifying user needs, replacing the predominant form of use through prompting with question-and-answer dialogs. These dialogs will also be used to preconfigure systems for IfU phases. The counterpart to IfU, which will become ever less-frequent, is intervening interaction, when users intervene to explore and adjust the performance of AI-based systems in exceptional situations or to optimize them for future task handling.
... By integrating digital interfaces and connectivity into smart appliances, heating, lighting and home energy management systems, building users have a wider range of potential control functionality (including automation, adaptive learning and user-defined routines). But, it remains unclear if this control functionality (Vogel 2008) e Food box deliveries bring regular door-to-door selections of fresh produce, which may be tailored to specific recipes, reducing waste and transport requirements for food retail (Hertz and Halkier 2017) f Food links schemes connect producers directly with consumers including through digital marketplaces to reduce waste, improve supplychain transparency and support specific production methods g Food redistribution or sharing schemes link local retailers (or consumers) with surplus food to charities (or consumers) needing food (Aschemann-Witzel et al. 2017) h Food waste reduction includes schemes in self-service food outlets to reduce portion size (Perchard 2016) is appealing, useable, and emissions-reducing (Hargreaves and Wilson 2017). These same innovations also tend to reduce users' autonomy by increasing the dependence of building management and performance on external service providers and infrastructures. ...
... By integrating digital interfaces and connectivity into smart appliances, heating, lighting and home energy management systems, building users have a wider range of potential control functionality (including automation, adaptive learning and user-defined routines). But, it remains unclear if this control functionality (Vogel 2008) e Food box deliveries bring regular door-to-door selections of fresh produce, which may be tailored to specific recipes, reducing waste and transport requirements for food retail (Hertz and Halkier 2017) f Food links schemes connect producers directly with consumers including through digital marketplaces to reduce waste, improve supplychain transparency and support specific production methods g Food redistribution or sharing schemes link local retailers (or consumers) with surplus food to charities (or consumers) needing food (Aschemann-Witzel et al. 2017) h Food waste reduction includes schemes in self-service food outlets to reduce portion size (Perchard 2016) is appealing, useable, and emissions-reducing (Hargreaves and Wilson 2017). These same innovations also tend to reduce users' autonomy by increasing the dependence of building management and performance on external service providers and infrastructures. ...
This paper investigates the potential for consumer-facing innovations to contribute emission reductions for limiting warming to 1.5 °C. First, we show that global integrated assessment models which characterise transformation pathways consistent with 1.5 °C mitigation are limited in their ability to analyse the emergence of novelty in energy end-use. Second, we introduce concepts of disruptive innovation which can be usefully applied to the challenge of 1.5 °C mitigation. Disruptive low-carbon innovations offer novel value propositions to consumers and can transform markets for energy-related goods and services while reducing emissions. Third, we identify 99 potentially disruptive low-carbon innovations relating to mobility, food, buildings and cities, and energy supply and distribution. Examples at the fringes of current markets include car clubs, mobility-as-a-service, prefabricated high-efficiency retrofits, internet of things, and urban farming. Each of these offers an alternative to mainstream consumer practices. Fourth, we assess the potential emission reductions from subsets of these disruptive low-carbon innovations using two methods: a survey eliciting experts’ perceptions and a quantitative scaling-up of evidence from early-adopting niches to matched segments of the UK population. We conclude that disruptive low-carbon innovations which appeal to consumers can help efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C.
Digitalization has opened up a wealth of new goods and services with strong consumer appeal alongside potential emission-reduction benefits. Examples range from shared, on-demand electric mobility and peer-to-peer trading of electricity, food, and cars to grid-responsive smart appliances and heating systems. In this review, we identify an illustrative sample of 33 digital consumer innovations that challenge emission-intensive mainstream consumption practices in mobility, food, homes, and energy domains. Across these domains, digital innovations offer consumers a range of potentially appealing attributes from control, choice, and convenience to independence, interconnectedness, and integration with systems. We then compile quantitative estimates of change in activity, energy, or emissions as a result of consumers adopting digital innovations. This novel synthesis of the evidence base shows clear but variable potential emission-reduction benefits of digital consumer innovations. However, a small number of studies show emission increases from specific innovations as a result of induced demand or substitution effects that need careful management by public policy. We also consider how concurrent adoption of digital consumer innovations across mobility, food, homes, and energy domains can cause broader disruptive impacts on regulatory frameworks, norms, and infrastructures. We conclude by arguing for the importance of public policy in steering the digitalization of consumer goods and services toward low-carbon outcomes.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 45 is October 19, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home-functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home-prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home-hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns-privacy and control-that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.
To support the transition towards an energy system that is based 100 percent on renewable energy sources, the smart grid is presently undergoing rapid development in Denmark – a hype that can also be seen in the rest of the world. Many actors are playing in the field, and the present situation is characterized by great uncertainty as to the direction of the development. The paper focuses on the role of households in the smart grid visions proposed by a broad range of stakeholders. It has two aims: first, to sort out the threads of the discussion; what visions are formulated regarding the role of households in the smart grid? What visions are articulated for the functionalities
of the smart home? Secondly, we critically investigate these visions to explore if they support the development of sustainable energy consumption. We claim that the smart home in the smart grid is the latest addition to a family of ideas emerging in relation to the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) in
the home. The smart home is thus a melting pot of such different trends as automation of household chores, entertainment and energy management. These different ingredients of the melting pot co-evolve, we argue, and we suggest that the coevolution may well have negative consequences for the overall energy impact of the transition. The smart grid could become a dynamic that constructs and normalizes new energy-demanding practices and facilitates escalating expectations to comfort. This paper only begins the exploration of the reported discussions;
much more research in this area needs to be done.
For many years technology researchers have promised a smart home that will provide the appropriate assistance to improve human experience. While technology researchers have focused on how people can control devices in their homes, our ethnographic research and findings by other social scientists have revealed that families want more control over their lives. We believe a smart home should provide families with a feeling of control over their lives: being relieved from breakdowns in their daily routines, and getting emotional satisfaction from the things they value – identity, time, and relationships. In this paper, we explore the roles that a smart home can play for families to regain control over their lives. We present our human-centered design research on dual-income families and suggest insights about the potential roles of a smart home based on this research.
European and national policies are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and increasing energy efficiency—also in the household sector. For this purpose, new solutions for private homes based on information and communication technologies (ICT) are being developed and tested. However, up to now, hardly anyone has seen, experienced or lived in an environment that offers the full range of ICT-based energy management solutions. In this study, consumer reactions to a fully furnished and equipped smart home are analysed using focus groups (four groups with a total of 29 participants). The analysis looks at consumer perceptions of and reactions to an energy management system which optimizes electricity consumption based on different ICT solutions. The topics that were demonstrated in practice and then discussed with the participants included variable tariffs, smart metering, smart appliances, and home automation. In general, there were positive group reactions to the smart home environment. Consumers saw many advantages for themselves; especially the chance to save money. However, giving up high levels of flexibility and adapting everyday routines to fit in with electricity tariffs were regarded as difficult. Smart appliances and smart meters were therefore considered to be necessary elements by most participants. Concerns regarding data privacy played a major role in one of the groups.
Smart grid research in Denmark has increasingly turned its focus on aggregator trading flexibility achieved by remotely controlling appliances, studying the technologies involved rather than the control. This paper investigates how different types of control were envisioned and designed for a two-year smart grid trial in Denmark with 20 private households. Using the notion of script, processes of in- and de-scription were used to gain insights into perceived and enacted control. Based on empirical data from 26 interviews and three workshops, we show how the in-scription process of control can be characterized as dynamic and includes negotiations between the residents and those responsible for the project. Second, we show how users de-script control, and third, we outline the project owners’ reaction to the user’s de-scription of control.
Home and automation are not natural partners--one homey and the other cold. Most current automation in the home is packaged in the form of appliances. To better understand the current reality and possible future of living with other types of domestic technology, we went out into the field to conduct need finding interviews among people who have already introduced automation into their homes and kept it there--home automators. We present the lessons learned from these home automators as frameworks and implications for the values that domestic technology should support. In particular, we focus on the satisfaction and meaning that the home automators derived from their projects, especially in connecting to their homes (rather than simply controlling their homes). These results point the way toward other technologies designed for our everyday lives at home.
Technical advances are bringing intelligent homes that respond to residents' needs and wishes within reach.
