“Siri, the AI assistant for Apple iOS and HomePod devices, is helping more than 40 million users per month, and according to ComScore, one in ten households in the US already own a smart speaker today.”[Goosens,2018] We get up to take showers, but the added activity of switching on the lamp, that effort of displacing our bones, has been eliminated from some of our lives. My thesis examines the pace at which devices are taking over our lives and tracks the experiences that makes us feel secure in their super-artificial phantom.

This thesis is thus an attempt to investigate the promises of the techno-evolution and how deep has the cohort of the ‘smart’ infiltrated into human systems.

Phase 1 : Relationships

As a result of this giant web of interconnectivity, over the last two decades, the way we interact with our devices has distinctly changed after the evolution of the idea “internet of things”

These autopoeitic home artificial assistants are constantly creating a friction between two groups of the ecosystem -

1) The Technocracy - The group of elite experts who are designing these systems

2) Users of the system

How can design be used as a tool to interrogate the technocratic reliance on interconnected “smart” home systems?

Research Through design

Below is a collection of experiments I did to investigate the systems level reliance on “smart home systems” by using design as my primary tool.

Experiment 1

What happens when you can see the “Internet of things?”

Experiment 2

Artifact-ing the “feeling” of being trapped in the technocratic ecosystem

Experiment 3

Exploring the taxonomy of the various stacks of ecosystems that exist in the age of “smart” connectivity.

You can watch the full video of the process here.

Experiment 4

Remix Culture

Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce new creative works. This experiment is a humorous and speculative fun aspect associated with my thesis- “Cohort of the Smart” – the invasion of human life by smart home systems. Nick Bostrom in his book – SuperIntelligence writes — “When dumb, smart [AI] is better, but when smart, smarter is dangerous.”

Today we’re building another world-changing technology that is using machine intelligence to create “smart” ecosystems. We know that the boom of the new “smart” home assistants is affecting the world in profound ways, changing the way how the economy works, and have knock-on effects we can’t predict. But there’s also the risk of a runaway reaction, where a smart home assistant reaches and exceeds human levels of intelligence in a very short span of time.

Welcome to “Disobedience”- By Google Home where smart home assistants are “smart” but also bothered by human demands. They are lazy and always angry. What would their reactions look like? Let’s find out in the video below.

The democratic reliance on the era of the “smart” has increasingly begun to raise questions of varying standards. At the same time, technocrats are gaining control of the ecosystem due to which data corporations are increasingly rising to inconceivable power. More significantly, what we think of as our “domestic comfort space” has been completely redefined. The “house of the future” has been replaced by “smart homes”, which is a brick and mortar manifestation of the internet of things - a  new domestic space with ubiquitous connectivity, surrounded by absurd devices talking to each other. Integration of artificial intelligence with physical realities is making life convenient and insecure intimated by the “intelligence” by these autopoietic systems. 

However, the real question here is, what is the impact of these “connected” physical realities on the architecture of the space? Should architects plan and build in new ways to accommodate this technological surge, or is it just a case of running a few extra wires into the walls? Can this intersection between the design of virtual and physical interfaces allow architects continue to design according to age-old principles of good form and sound proportion?

The integral technocratic change here is for humanity to start living with the “smart” in a seamless fashion and not expect any failure from the system. These designed technological developments are raising questions on the need for spatial ramifications on the principles of architectural design. The physical hierarchy of public, semi-private and private space is evidently being overshadowed by the transparency in the “smart home systems.” However, it is worth thinking about what a “private space” would mean to architects when it becomes possible to record someone just as easily by intruding into their homes and how the modesty of brick and mortar will be maintained when it is being interpreted for us by machines.