The Home in the Digital Age

Antonio Argandoña, Joy Malala, Richard Peatfield, Antonio Argandoña, Joy Malala, Richard Peatfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367530174
• eBook ISBN: 9781000394351
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Inteligencia artificial (IA) y semántica

The Home in the Digital Age is a set of multidisciplinary studies exploring the impact of digital technologies in the home, with a shift of emphasis from technology to the people living and using this in their homes.

The book covers a wide variety of topics on the design, introduction and use of digital technologies in the home, combining the technological dimension with the cognitive, emotional, cultural and symbolic dimensions of the objects that incorporate digital technologies and project them onto people's lives. It offers a coherent approach, that of the home, which gives unity to the discussion.

Scholars of the home, the house and the family will find here the connection with the problems derived from the use of domestic robots and connected devices. Students of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, big data and other branches of digital technologies will find ideas and arguments to apply their disciplines to the home and participate fruitfully in forums where digital technologies are built and negotiated in the home. Experts from various disciplines ? psychologists and sociologists; philosophers, epistemologists and ethicists; economists; engineers, architects, urban planners and designers and so on ? and also those interested in developing policies for the home and family will find this book contains well-founded and useful ideas to focus their work.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The home in the digital age

Antonio Argandoña, Joy Malala and

Richard C. Peatfield

The car has left the highway. We are close to our house. Using our mobile phone, we send a message; the porch and entrance lights come on and the heating starts up so that when we arrive the temperature is adequate, which the device itself has learned is the one we prefer. The house is filled with soft music – we are coming to our smart home.

There are many definitions of smart home, and not all coincide (Aldrich, 2003). To introduce the readers to what they can find in this book, the definition of Balta-Ozkan et al. (2013, 364, cited in Hargreaves et al. 2017, 127) will help us: a smart home is a “residence equipped with a high-tech network, linking sensors and domestic devices, appliances and features that can be remotely monitored, access[ed] or controlled, and provide services that respond to the needs of [the] inhabitants”.

Computational agents have most definitely left the lab and entered daily life in a variety of forms. The Internet of Things (IoT) is incrementally making homes smarter by embedding networked, ambient technologies with varying degrees of autonomy into the physical and social fabric of domestic life … As domestic service robot technologies advance and become more commercially accessible, the smart home will have already changed the domestic setting and laid the groundwork for robots to assimilate.

(Urquhart et al., 2019, 247)

What a smart home now offers is much more than the devices that have been introduced in houses for decades, but it is still not within the reach of most users.

The literature on digital technologies has paid little attention to the home, beyond optimistic narratives about fabulous cleaning robots, integrated platforms and the information and communication capacity offered by mobiles, or pessimistic predictions about the negative impact of technology on employment, the dependency caused by screens, especially in children and adolescents, or the risks that smartphones pose to the privacy of citizens.

The home has always been a recipient and user of new technologies. The digital age is no exception: on the contrary, the process has been accelerating for decades. Technology promises comfort, convenience, companionship, security and leisure, among many other benefits. It does not always achieve this effectively and without causing inconvenience, among other reasons, because what the experts try to achieve with their machines and programs does not always coincide with what families expect or want, or with what they can achieve, given their material and human resources: learning to live in a smart home and get the most out of its technologies is not an easy task. It is not enough to bring technology to the house; it is not even enough to “embed” it in the house, because “these artefacts... are restructuring interactions, social order and relationships in the home” (Urquhart et al., 2019, 247).

This book is intended to offer various multidisciplinary views on the relationship between digital technologies and the home.

According to Argandoña:

The concept of the home focuses on three internal elements: the person, the inner community or family, and shared living space with an intention of continuity. But there is also a fourth external element that cannot be excluded: the external social and material environment. These elements work together; the person is at the centre but the unifying concept is the home.

(Argandoña, 2018, 11)

The social function of the home can be explained in terms of “why” the home exists, “for what” it exists and what is its “purpose”. “The ‘why’ looks towards the past and seeks to give an explanation”: it is an efficient and humane way to satisfy many needs.

The “what for” looks towards the future... The “what for” invokes a function, first for its members, but later on for others outside of the home, and eventually reaching society as a whole … A home without a “what for” can function for quite some time … But it will be lacking a “purpose”, which is the “what for” as defined, shared, and accepted by that particular community’s members … This “purpose” is not usually stated explicitly … but this does not mean that they do not have an implicit “purpose” or “project”. The lack of a “project”, or the existence of several unshared “projects”, implies a lack of unity, and this is a threat for the home’s continued existence.

(Abdelmonem and Argandoña, 2020, 6)

In Chapter 4, Professor Abdelmonem mentions a hierarchy of houses, according to the nature and intensity of the presence of digital technologies in them:

1.Homes which contain intelligent objects: homes contain single, stand-alone applications and objects which function in an intelligent manner.

2.Homes which contain intelligent, communicating objects: homes contain appliances and objects which function intelligently in their own right and which also exchange information between each other to increase functionality.

3.Connected homes: homes have internal and external networks, allowing interactive and remote control of systems, as well as access to services and information, both within and beyond the home.

4.Learning homes: patterns of activity in the homes are recorded and the accumulated data are used to anticipate users’ needs and to control the technology accordingly.

5.Attentive homes: the activity and location of people and objects within the homes are constantly registered, and this information is used to control technology in anticipation of the occupants’ needs.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between digital technologies and the home will vary considerably depending on the type of home, the location, the level of technological development and many other factors. Here we offer some general reflections that can guide the reading of this book; the specific content of each chapter is detailed at the end of this one.

The impact of digital technologies in the home

The common thread of this book is the home, broadly understood as a place for security and control, for activity, for relationships and continuity, and for identity and values (Gram-Hanssen and Darby, 2018). The community of people living in a physical space will always be the objective of our analysis, particularly when we consider the impact of technology on that space and on the objects. We will end up studying a particular aspect, to which the literature has given considerable attention: the impact of technology on work.

Physical space

The house is the material sphere of the home, including its facilities and its belongings and, therefore, the technologies incorporated into them. The home is not just a physical space (the house, abode, shelter or dwelling); it is also a cultural and psychological space (Argandoña, 2018; Buttimer and Seamon, 2015; Cuba and Hummon, 1993; d’Entremont, 2018). The home is not understood without the people who live in it and who personalize it: it is a place for human relationships (Karjalainen, 1993). “Thus, while the idea of home can be viewed as a universal concept, the experience of home is socially and culturally determined” (Fox O’Mahony, 2013, 165). The home also has a temporal dimension: it is “a unique place where a person’s past, present, and future selves are reflected and come to life” (Graham et al., 2015, 346), and is also the place where many intergenerational relationships occur.

The home fulfils many functions: restaurant, hotel, leisure space, place of study and work, sometimes hospital, movie theatre, an area in which you learn to live and return to after years, but it is much more than that. Similarly, the impacts of digital technologies are related to that of functional dimension of home, but they also go much further. Chapter 4 offers interesting insights into those impacts, many of which are intangible but real. Technology provokes changes in lifestyles and, at the same time, allows people to adapt to them, an adaptation that is often more social and emotional than physical. Technology is not neutral. In turn, the social order of the home imposes conditions on the technologies that are appropriate, especially when it comes to aid and surveillance for the elderly, sick, disabled or children (Urquhart et al., 2019).

On top of this the furniture, ornaments and appliances in the home add to each individual’s effective “reference plexus”. Taken together, they make up the home’s human world (Highmore, 2011; Miller, 2001). Chapter 6 discusses not only the physical or material dimension, but also the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and symbolic dimensions of the objects that incorporate digital technologies and project them onto people’s lives. This produces a recurrent conflict between commercial interests and efforts to improve the quality of life and empower home members. It is logical, therefore, that frequent changes take place, not only in the material dimension, but also in people and their relationships with machines and programs. The most important thing about home technology is that it changes the lives of its members.

Home management

An important, though not unique, motivation for the introduction and use of digital technologies in the home is to facilitate its management, as explained in Chapter 3. Domestic robots and connected devices (meters, sensors and alarms) are involved in this task. A robot is:

[A]‌n actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks. Autonomy in this context means the ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing, without human intervention.

(ISO Standard 8373: 2012 on Robots and Robotic Devices, s2.08¹)

There are many types of robots that perform various tasks, such as vacuuming and floor cleaning (IFR, 2017, 14).

The interrelation between domestic robots and connected devices makes the communication of users with machines more intuitive, but it presents the risk of introducing biases that sacrifice the needs of users to the economic interests of producers (Leppënen and Jokinen, 2003). Wilson et al. (2015, 466) invite us to consider “how to use and meaning of technologies will be socially constructed and iteratively negotiated, rather than being the inevitable outcome of assumed functional benefits”. Added to this are problems of user training and learning, security of the information collected by devices, interference of automation in people’s pleasurable activities (Coskun et al., 2018) and in the autonomy of users (Coeckelbergh, 2012; Leenes and Lucivero, 2014), confidence in technology, and related problems, which are discussed in several chapters of this book, especially in Chapter 2.

Digital technology and people

As explained in Chapter 9, technology is a mediator, insofar as it influences people’s actions and experiences (cf. Verbeek, 2006, 363ff), in that it not only allows agents access to reality, but also focuses, limits and conditions that access. Domestic robots also act as mediators for users and intermediaries for services (Urquhart et al., 2019, 249) – hence the relevance of human–computer interaction (Dautenhahn, 2018; Goodrich and Schultz, 2007). Chapter 5 explains that such interactions are not limited to human-powered machines, but rather involve processes of humanizing technology – when, for example, domestic robots are treated as if they were “someone” with emotions, intentions and beliefs – with the risk of distorting the nature of relationships between people and machines. In short, the human–computer interaction leads us to consider home robots as integral elements of the “ecology of the mind”.

Chapter 9 also deals with the person–machine–person relationship, this time from an ethical point of view. Ethics is understood here not as a set of abstract principles, or as an extrinsic limitation to the initiative of the experts, or even as an ethics of action, which defines morality and meaning of concrete action. The proposed ethic is directed to the development of the character of the person, first of the user, but also, consequently, of the designer, producer, distributor or regulator: in short, an ethic of norms, goods and virtues. The ethical consequences of digital technologies are also discussed in other chapters.

The effect of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword: Bryan K. Sanderson, CBE
• Foreword: Carlos P. Cavallé
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The home in the Digital Age
• Chapter 2 Digital Home: The missing Element for a People-Centred Digital Future
• Chapter 3 Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Technology in the Home
• Chapter 4 Contested Homes in the Age of the Cloud: The Changing Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Family Living and care for Older People in the 21st Century
• Chapter 5 Homes as human–Robot Ecologies: An Epistemological Inquiry on the “Domestication” of Robots
• Chapter 6 Homes Through the Design Shift in the Digital Age
• Chapter 7 Automation, the Home and work
• Chapter 8 The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Future of Work
• Chapter 9 Ethics and Digital Technologies in the Home
• Index