3 - The Smart Home: A Collected Target

Summary

Chapter 3 examines the implications of sensorisation in the smart home. The smart home is chosen as a collected world case study for several reasons. First, it is a site of dense sensorisation and thus a good space to explore technological infrastructures that belie the smart world. Second, it is one of the prime sites of sensor data commercialisation, including the new business models that are developing. Third, the home is a legally protected idyll of the ‘private’ and it plays a cherished role as a space of autonomous individual growth in liberal societies. The chapter details the complex data generation anatomy of the smart home and examines it from its sensing, reasoning and intervening processes. Even though the smart home is framed as a space of seamless technological experience, its infrastructural anatomy is fragmented and multifarious because it includes multiple data collection devices, diverse collection pathways and involves several different infrastructures. Chapter 3 concludes by highlighting that sensor data is key to the operation of the smart home and the business models that are now starting to develop.