The Real Motivation behind Home Automation

When it comes to my home automation set up there are a few reactions I get. Most people enthusiastically engage and ask questions, showing genuine interest. Others politely—and rather awkwardly—ignore the fact that my table lamp turned itself on for no apparent reason. Once the initial hurdle of introducing people to home automation is overcome though, I always get the same reaction.

So… you can control your lamps with your phone? That’s cool.

General reaction to home automation

While that is true, it is not the motivation behind home automation. It is easy to show off a smart home by turning on a table lamp using a phone, though that is by no means the reason for adding smart devices into the household in the first place.

Some Guidelines

This is where I would like to introduce the “golden rules of home automation”–some guidelines really– because they are important to keep in mind when integrating technology into the home environment.

1. It has to be at least as useful as the existing alternative
2. It must enhance your experience in some way. Whether that is through time saved, the replacement of a poor interface or the ability to completely automate the existing interaction (elimination of an interface, later discussed in more depth).

The objective is not to involve software for the sake of it, but to improve the human experience in the system in some way.

Example: Checkout Machines

Companies often use software to automate robotic processes or replace human staff in an effort to reduce cost. One notorious example of this is the introduction of self-checkout machines.

Unexpected item in bagging area.

This is a great example where the introduction of new technology and automation has not sufficiently improved the experience of those using the technology. This can’t be helped in a public environment, however we should be very careful when introducing such technologies in the home.

We observe this same phenomenon happening in fast food chains, where large touch screens are being installed to serve as self-checkout. The purpose of these machines was not to improve the customer experience or save customer time (they could just employ more counter staff…), but to reduce staffing costs and cut costs in general for the company.¹

To get back to the topic of discussion, we have to question whether the home automation technology we wish to introduce has a positive effect on our lives, or whether it is simply adding another human-computer interface without much benefit.

Using a new technology to make another technology disappear

So after all this, why is it worthwhile to control lamps with a phone? The answer is automation. If a button on your phone can control your lamps, then software can too! This is essentially the simplest form of automation, where the trigger is a button push on a web page. Once you can control lights using a web interface, you can control them using more sophisticated logic defined in automations. which have the power to eliminate the concept of and need to turn lights on and off.

The real power of home automation is in its ability to make the underlying technology disappear.

Imagine a brave new world where you walk into a room and the light is already on, as you have naturally come to expect after years of living with such a technology. When you leave the room the light is turned off and nobody even takes note of it because it is completely taken for granted. This leaves you more mental capactiy to worry about other things.

Once the need to control light has been eliminated, you become more and more ignorant of “light switches” until they are nothing more than a strange fragment of the past that just used to “come with the building”. Never would it occur to you to link those flicky things on the wall to the light bulb (or future equivalent) above your head. The light is on when you need it and off when you don’t. Just like the sun rises and sets every day, without any action required on your part, we will forget that there was ever a need for pushy flicky switchy things on walls.

On the next page, we get a bit philosophical…