The technology that makes the sun rise and set
What if, in the distant past, people manually triggered the sunrise and sunset every day? Sounds ridiculous but let me tell you t his analogy.
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They organised shifts, paid people a salary, and there was an elaborate organisation responsible for the sun schedule, charging taxes for their service. Through the invention of some “magic” sun-setting/rising technology, however, the need for humans to trigger the sun has been eliminated. Today we live our lives completely oblivious to this technology that is still working away somewhere unbeknownst to us, fully automated, reliably triggering sunset and rise. Meanwhile mankind has moved on to invent new technologies and worry about other things such as the charge left in our phones or the likes on particular Instagram photos.
Home automation is about reducing non-essential interactions with our home environment. Intelligently designed automations can make life much easier.
Think about that for a moment. We talked about interfaces before, why they are bad and why it is important to avoid introducing new interfaces for the sake of it. Now we are talking about eliminating existing interfaces in an effort to make the technology go away. This is in the sense that the technology does its job without requiring supervision or action from a human being.
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A light switch, for example, is a human interface designed to bridge the gap between a person and an electronic circuit. If we can completely eliminate the need to control lights (through automation), we eliminate the need for light switches! This is powerful stuff, because it applies not only to trivial examples like light switches but others as well like air conditioning, security, and maintenance.
This is why self-serve checkouts or controlling lights manually using your phone is so counterintuitive. They replace one reliable, trusted and known interface with a new, unfriendly and less-than-proven digital interface.
Conclusion
We have covered a lot of interesting aspects of home automation in this post and where I think the focus really lies. The motivation of getting your home to do things for you is not the novelty of “ultimate phone control” but rather eliminating existing interfaces through smart automation, or at the very least, replacing poor interfaces with more effective ones.
