A Visual analysis of the smart home
Abstract
To date, studies related to the smart home have often focused on the technical aspects of the home. Few have given attention to how ‘smartness’ is reconfiguring a sense of home and how these changes may be identified in the smart home’s visual signatures. This research closes this gap in the current literature by mobilizing a visual methodologies approach comprised of content, compositional, and semiotic analysis to identify whether and how visual representations of the ‘smart home’ in architectural trade publications reconfigure understandings of the meaning of the "home.”
The outcomes of this research are a typology of smart home aesthetics, and a theorization of how these aesthetics as inform how the smart home is reconfiguring meanings of the home. Based on this typology, this research theorizes what image-based representations of the smart home represent ‘home’ to be, and how ‘smart’ aesthetics reconfigure the home as a site for social relations, intimacy, and leisure. This case study sheds light on the various meanings behind smart home images in architectural trade publications, as well as how they represent the concept of ‘home’. This research shows that there are two modalities of smart home images: i) smart home images with visible technology, ii) smart home images in which technology is hidden. My semiotic interpretations of these images find that images in both of these categories are doing two works simultaneously. On one hand, images of smart homes where technology is visible function to build readers’ trust in the ‘smart home’ concept by visually confirming that they are still homes in the traditional sense of a ‘home’. On the other hand, in images where smart home technologies themselves are invisible, sparse furnishings and minimalistic design aesthetics depict ‘smart homes’ as domestic spaces where smart technologies have already taken care of all the messiness, chaos, and housework that is often associated with ‘home’.