Understanding Interactions in the Smart Home

In this article we explore two issues that can lead to problems for smart-home systems; socio-technical interactions and cyclic interactions. Both issues threaten to obstruct the uptake of the vision for the smart home. At the heart of these problems is interaction; interaction between systems and interaction between people and systems. In its simplest form a smart home is one in which most electronic and electrical devises (including computer based systems) are connected to each other and the outside world via computer networks (Figure 1). At one extreme smart homes simply enable sharing of digital media across a home network or, at another extreme, enable collections of networked devices to coordinate their actions. They also enable the creation of so-called “virtual-appliance” 1 that work by deconstructing conventional appliances and applications into their elemental services and offering these back to the network user, so they may be recombined in various ways.