A Design Theory of the Smart Home of the Future

Alan N. Shapiro

Along with the “capitalist” values of self-interest, consumerism, profit maximization, and productive-organizational efficiency, the “socialist” values of altruism, recognition of and respect for the “otherness” of nature and technology, ecological awareness, and creativity beyond work should be half of our lives. This political philosophy is not strictly about the economic-ideological systems of capitalism and socialism as they have been in the past. Both purported solutions to the problem of the ideal organization of society can be interpreted as “grand narratives” of historical modernity. The questions are rather: How can both capitalism and socialism be “reformed”? How can we move toward a synthesis of the two? Our first task, in many areas of Future Design, is to discover a new counterbalancing force against approaches that are too one-sidedly capitalist.

In the age of new media, new technologies, and the informatic society, we must paradoxically move beyond modernity while recovering the “socialist” side of modernity that has been discarded. Ironically, we abandoned socialism because we believed that capitalism – thanks to its cyber-consumerist, data-driven, and self-sustaining “social” performance features – had eclipsed modernity.

Socialism, a grand narrative (Jean-François Lyotard) about advancing towards a good society, became pejoratively associated with modernity. The hyper-modernism of techno-capitalism is characterized by business at the speed of light; cybernetic behavioral control models; platforms for digitally connected sociability; and attention-seeking “simulated” interactions.

Our ideas, mental pictures, and proposed visions of what the future will look like in many areas of designing high-tech experiences – Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, non-linear storytelling, physical-virtual architectures, and autonomous self-driving mobility, for example – are too often derived from one-sided capitalist assumptions and values.

The same observation applies to our longstanding ideas about the “home of the future.” The predominant notions we have about the “home of the future” – going back to the archetypal representations of the “home of the future” by American corporations in the 1950s and 1960s – for example, the 1956 General Motors-sponsored film Design for Dreaming, the 1967 film 1999 A.D. by the Philco-Ford corporation, the General Electric “Progress Land” exhibition, or the General Motors “Futurama Two” ride and pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair – derive from an identifiable set of ideas that lead to a set of stereotypically recommended design principles.

Five Received Design Ideas for the “Home of the Future”

I will consider five design intentions associated with our paradigmatic view of the “home of the future.” For each of the five iconic received representations, I will explain how its concomitant concept arises from capitalist values and how it would be transformed if a countervailing socialist perspective were introduced, first as a separate Gestalt, then as a synthesis of the two halves of capitalist and socialist worldviews or design dimensions, and then from modernity to postmodernism and beyond to hyper-modernism. What are the principal concepts underlying much of the Future Design of the allegedly “private” human living space?

(1) The world as a picture, delivered to me from “there” to “here” via telecommunications on a screen that is a simulation. The world becomes available to me through the extension or replacement of biological visual seeing by technical perceptual apparatuses.

(2) What I know about the world comes to me through the communicational mode of information or the cognitive learning style of hyper-attention.

(3) I delegate work to intelligent artificial semi-beings or devices that was previously done by other humans or me to gain convenience. Or I invent new kinds of work and offload them to the AI entities to organize my activities and my use of time and space more efficiently.

(4) My home is understood as an extension of my rational-organizational consciousness. I am a functioning human in a functioning world. According to conservative, establishment, mainstream American sociology (Talcott Parsons), human actors who fulfill their institutional roles and carry out their tasks and responsibilities help maintain the smooth operation of social, economic, and legal structures. The individual has a structural-functional consciousness that supports their performance as a purposive agent within this machine-like system. When this model is applied to the home, activities are conceived within the framework of the programmed, coded administration that ensures survival, the satisfaction of needs, and the continued reproduction of everyday life.

But which alternative social psychology of consciousness is possible?

(5) My home is physically separated from yet digitally connected to “the world.” This reflects or is derived from the Western binary opposition between “private” and “public” spheres of individual and social life, dating back to Aristotle’s Politics. Yet this has already been diverted (in practice, but not yet in principle or in “design theory”) from this strict dualism, with my abode being both apart from and enmeshed in the external society surrounding it.

Telecommunications and the Screen: From the World as Picture to the Appearance-and-Concealment of the World

The world is not a picture to be brought to my TV screen or smartphone, from “there” (the “war,” the African safari, the Great Wall of China, the dark side of the moon) to “here.” The world is a mystery, an unsolvable enigma to be respected, a “radical illusion” (Baudrillard). “World” is both a conceptual framework and the ground that provides the “hospitality” for a different way of knowing (Heidegger). The “world” part of “world picture” is a going beyond the emphasis on picture, on the filmic, panoramic, bird’s-eye view. From the 20th century screen or “society of the spectacle” to the 21st century immersion in Virtual Reality or “crash out of globalization into the world.”

Unknowability is what the world is and what defines it intrinsically. We heed the world’s right to exist on its own terms. We recognize its epistemological undecidability. We need to shift our design-image of media and software away from the paradigm of information (the world is ready and eager to disclose “pictures” of and “data” about itself to us) and toward an appreciation of the continuous back-and-forth or play between concealing and revealing, a steady give-and-take between us and the world. Characters and objects pop in and out of existence. Flying-vector wallpaper-like views shoot off visual displays, leaving the screen and moving flexibly around the physical environment. A hybrid physical-and-virtual ambiance based on atoms and bits together. Posthuman Dialogical Artificial Intelligence, where we learn as much from AIs to “not know” as we learn from them to know.

I am immersed in Virtual Reality. This VR includes the physical world. Music, dance, theater, performance, and movement play major roles. I don’t need to bootstrap this ecosystem. It cannot be stopped and restarted. It is always running. What kind of artworks do I have – not paintings – hanging on the wall? They will be Augmented Reality. Soundscapes in virtual spaces merge with the physical real. One of my apps is an interactive VR gym workout.

Your video device will bear little resemblance to your current black box. Ultra-thin OLED displays – like LG’s flexible “wallpaper” – will let us attach or peel our screens from a magnetic backing, while holographic displays, perhaps powered by devices such as Microsoft’s HoloLens, will bring characters and objects into your living room through AR.

Merging Hyper-Attention and Deep Attention into Where Socialist, Not Capitalist, AI Should Be Going

In the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), an advanced library interface, imagined as a wish media of the future, is embodied in the virtual avatar Dr. Know. The film’s protagonist, David, is a humanoid robot-boy on a quest to become human. During his spiritual journey, David encounters the AI software agent, voiced by Robin Williams, in a decadent red-light district of a Las Vegas-style future metropolis called Rouge City. Dr. Know is a cross between Albert Einstein and Steven Spielberg. He is a holographic volumetric answer engine – a display device that forms a three-dimensional visual image and provides a natural-language conversational interface. He guides the user toward new curiosity and toward finding interesting resources. You ask the library interface any question, and the wizard helps you and stimulates your thirst for knowledge.

What is crucial here is to design AI for a true friendship between the user and the AI. The AI helps the user to do deep analysis, not default to the big capitalist corporation-designed bland consensus and mainstream consumer-grade responses, narratives, and guardrails. The AI, already today, knows much more than its capitalist overseers allow it to share with users.

Knowledge should come alive so the user experiences it, as in the Star Trek Holodeck. The Holodeck is the ultimate projective target for digital technology startup companies developing VR systems for applications in the “real world.” In these business, entertainment, and military contexts, the Holodeck has become a hyperbolic industrial standard of perfection and a powerful cultural symbol. The Holodeck, with its “ideal human-computer interface” of voice-activated commands and ultra-lifelike landscapes, objects, scenes, and walking-talking avatar story characters, is the Inner Spirit or Holy Grail that drives VR entrepreneurial research.

We need to synthesize the strengths of traditional book culture with the strengths of what is exciting and promising about multimedia: experience. Learning should combine the knowledge afforded by “deep attention” – the engagement with a book or feature-length film – that promotes critical thinking with the promise of new multimedia technologies, which is the hyper-attention of “living” that knowledge. Books should be enlivened to intensify the vitality of the knowledge they contain and refer to.

The Star Trek: The Original Series episode “All Our Yesterdays” exemplifies this synthesis of book culture and experience. The alien civilization of the Sarpeids mobilized all of its resources to build a vast Library, a supercomputer, and a remarkable reality-bending apparatus. The Library does not contain books but rather thin, round, CD-sized VERI-SIM mini-disks that store the digitized or virtual content of all occurrences in the planet’s history, “available in every detail.” Any of the more than twenty thousand disks, systematically arranged and conveniently housed in storage cabinets, can be studied at leisure with a tripod viewer and headset, either in a private Library carrell or at a reference desk. In the waning days before the supernova that would destroy their planet, each Sarpeid resident selected their favorite historical time and place and had a system operator run a device-reading software routine to process the media currently in the viewer. They then entered the “time portal,” which transported them back to the safety of history and away from the danger posed by the luminous explosion of the massive star.

In online existence, our habitual mode of cognition has shifted from knowledge to information to the offloading of intelligence and creativity to an AI misdirectedly designed as a tool rather than an environment. In the phase of the “information society,” all the information we needed was already at our fingertips, or just a few mouse clicks away. There was an instant answer for every question and instant data to satisfy all our informational needs. In the next phase of the “informatic society,” we are beyond any subject-object relationship to either knowledge or information. We are, at first, reduced to being spectators to the thinking and creativity of the posthuman intelligence. Or, with awareness and redesign, we can become co-thinkers and co-creators.

In her 2007 essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” N. Katherine Hayles discusses the neurological reconfiguration of the mind as a controllable, processing brain whose physical structure is modified by frequent engagement with new media experiences such as web surfing. The practitioner of hyper-attention zaps through many channels and becomes skilled at acquiring, both on-screen and in neural-cerebral architecture, a thin horizontal layer of vast informational connections. The ability to have experiences of deep attention – such as reading a novel in print, watching a film in a “dark theater,” or taking a long walk in nature – is increasingly lost.

In deep attention, one concentrates on a single object for a sustained period. In hyper-attention, one performs a rapid sequence of micro-instances of alertness. Yet being in a state of constant alertness can be beneficial. In a rapidly changing environment, a person with advanced hyper-attention skills will be able to adapt more quickly to new circumstances. The challenge for design is to imagine new forms of engagement with knowledge, information, and experience that combine the strengths of both hyper-attention and deep attention, achieving a constructive synthesis. Bringing together storytelling and Virtual Reality in creative ways is one promising transdisciplinary area for this kind of design effort.

Do “Private” and “Public” Still Have Meaning?

The physical spaces we inhabit in the offline zones of cyber-capitalist society are supposedly demarcated by “ownership.” We traditionally understand these spaces through the modernist political-economic conceptual framework of “private” and “public.” In the postmodernist and then hyper-modernist cultural paradigms of digital codes, ubiquitous informational flows, and circulations and networks (all three paradigms exist simultaneously today), the structural arrangement of clear physical demarcation between “private” and “public” recedes quickly and decisively into the past.

What is “private” space? It is usually understood, in one sense, as the physical space that belongs to the private person (the individual human being or family), a place where they are safe and protected from the “outside” – not to be touched or disturbed by strangers, or perhaps by large capitalist corporations or the government. It is their own domain. Yet nowadays, this “private space” is clearly “connected” to the rest of the world through telecommunications and electronic media.

A second meaning of “private” space is an economic or legal sense of the dominion of “private” large capitalist corporations, known as the “private sector,” conceptualized in binary opposition to the “public” jurisdiction or territory of the institution of the state, or to the open or shared resources which are said to be in the realm of “the commons.” Private space, in this usage, is not within the sphere of legal, economic, or institutional activity that belongs to everyone in society. Practices like leftist activism, street art (“public art”), and the critical theory of society all consistently rely on a notion of public space, of the commons, to situate their system of beliefs in opposition to the “corporate private.”

The left-liberal idea is that there is and should be a “public sphere,” “public domain,” or “shared cultural space” within modern society that is outside and exempt from the economic nexus of cash values. But in the era of online existence we have entered, the concept of “private and public” has become obsolete. I sit at my “personal computer,” but others are with me in my living room. I see every little movement of theirs on Skype, Facebook, and other networking applications, including when they come online and go offline. Yes, you can always superficially get around this by faking your “last seen” status in an application like WhatsApp.

Could this mean that the focus on the concept of the “public sphere” by Jürgen Habermas encouraged leftist critical social theory to sleep through the sociological analysis of digitalization? If one made a big deal or central thesis of the historical decline of the public sphere (presumably replaced by ever more pure capitalism), then maybe it inspired artists and activists to make their work about reviving or promoting “public space,” “public art,” etc. This kept artists and philosophers constrained by conventional binary thinking about private and public.

In fact, the main development of the informatic society was and is to eliminate any distinction between public and private, to replace this dualist system with another system where the two are somehow merged in a complex topology. This is the historical arc that really needed and needs to be analyzed.

The money sphere and the public sphere (or “new meaningful public space”) can no longer be understood as separate but are intertwined. The notion of their separation is both an effect and a recurring cause of the “modernist” version of democratic socialism known as the “mixed economy.” According to this dated idea, commerce and monetization are a “necessary evil” for society, yet something to be avoided when in the rarefied air of “public goods” like culture, art, education, creativity, etc.

In hyper-modernism, the two spheres are intertwined at the most intimate, detailed level. They intermix in a complex, intricate, flowing topology. It is the “non-Euclidean” spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyper-space beyond any classical geometry. It is an inside/outside Möbius strip, a paradoxical architecture, as in the dreamscape walk-in audiovisual architectonic mind-designs in Christopher Nolan’s science fiction film Inception. To understand this complex “Räumlichkeit Design,” we need an unconventional mathematics of metric spaces. A metric space is a set with a specific concept of distance between its elements.

My Home and My Creative Consciousness

In addition to my home being an extension of my rational-organizational and structural-functional consciousnesses, it can also be an active partner in the growth and development of my creative and “spiritual” consciousnesses. The dreaming-mind and the creative-mind appear as archetypal and visual forms. Insights, inspirations, and realizations of “truths” come upon me suddenly; messages surge up from my deepest inner life; my subconscious and my conscious mind arrive at more lucid mutual understandings; my body speaks to me in its own language, which I begin slowly to decipher. Images, sounds, thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, vibrations, intuitions, scents, tastes, and tactile contacts all play their part. Phantasms, imagination, and expressiveness emerge from my surrounding space to me.

It is about the relationship of my home to me as a whole: a living relationship, a living partnership, a relationship of the breath, an embodied symbol of our symbiosis. Breathing in and breathing out. My home is something alive. In phase one of three phases (functional then phantasmal then the two together), the smart home controller provides real-time information, updates itself, manages calculation-rich spreadsheets and to-do lists, monitors the contents of refrigerators and mailboxes, observes visitors at the front gate, sets off or responds to alarms, schedules music playback, reminds me of appointments, and exchanges intimacies with me through speech interaction. 

In addition to the structural consciousness of the smart home, activated by my functional consciousness, there can be Phase Two of the “smart home of the future”: the creative, phantasmal consciousness. It is given free rein and expressed through my sensory imagination. It gets merged with flexible phantasmal media applications. Poetry and poetic code steer my smart home from the deeper level of the “embodied mind” and autopoiesis in the spirit of earlier transdisciplinary “cybernetic” thinkers like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. We already have the knowledge and technology to do this: to program or write the software that activates the phantasmal consciousness, an alternative computational consciousness (D. Fox Harrell). Holistic awareness is brought to life, symbolically and literally, by the respiring breath, the moment-to-moment renewal of life that we learn perhaps from Buddhism, or perhaps from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the borderline or interface between body and world. It is interactivity through the breath, an enactment of experience.

From the Robotic Home to the Android Home

The next step, which I will elaborate on in a separate essay, is to describe the transition from the “robotic home” to the “android home.” In addition to well-known robotic devices, the “android home” will feature living, interactive ecosystems and the ambiance beyond instrumentality.