Smart Homes, Families, and Control

For many years technology researchers have promised a smart home that will provide the appropriate assistance to improve human experience. While technology researchers have focused on how people can control devices in their homes, our ethnographic research and findings by other social scientists have revealed that families want more control over their lives. We believe a smart home should provide families with a feeling of control over their lives: being relieved from breakdowns in their daily routines, and getting emotional satisfaction from the things they value – identity, time, and relationships. In this paper, we explore the roles that a smart home can play for families to regain control over their lives. We present our human-centered design research on dual income families and suggest insights about the potential roles of a smart home based on this research.