Signals of the Future: from Smart Home Surveillance to Living Alone
Last month’s signals of the future look at how we will design and live in the homes of the future.
Living Alone
More people are living alone. I was doing a piece of consultancy on solo-living — quantity, prospects, and what products and services this might require — and this confirmed that the number of single-person households in the UK has grown steadily over recent decades and now makes up over a third of all households. (This is still way behind Sweden where almost half of households have just one occupant).
For many people living alone is a positive choice. But it does bring challenges — pressures on housing provision, higher resource use, increased environmental impact, more loneliness, and for many, greater vulnerability to life changes.
There are a number of causes: not cohabiting or waiting until later in life before moving in together, couples more likely to separate than before, and an increase in the total number of elderly people (meaning more single people who have lost a partner).
Solo-living, drawing on the sharing economy, is likely to be a major component of our future society. However, the majority of households will still be two or more people and there is a rapid increase in another trend — multi-generational housing. This is driven by the high cost of housing with adult children living with their parents longer to save money for a deposit or just because they’re unable to afford to live separately. There are also the high costs of childcare and lack of social care for the elderly. With the population steadily growing older and no signs of housing becoming more affordable, multi-generational living is set to increase.
Of course, for most of human history we have lived in extended family units. And for many cultures this is still the norm. Maybe one future for housing will involve going back to this past.
The Multi-Functional Home
How many functions will the dwelling of the future perform? I ran a scenarios session this week where we brainstormed what an urban regeneration scheme of 2040 might look like.
One of the ideas posited was the multipurpose dwelling that could be simultaneously a home, an office, a gym, a cinema, a hotel, a university, a power station, a care home, and a medical centre. Advances in digitisation and automation would enable this new way of living.
Many of the component parts are already popular today: Zoom for meetings, bands and mats for exercise, home movie projectors, Airbnb for temporary lets, MOOCS for learning, solar panels for electricity, remote sensing for elders, and virtual GP appointments. Expect AI, AR, and VR to take these to the next level.
But we do all these things — and more — in essentially the same physical spaces. Will the homes of the future be built to be flexible, not just day-to-day — with hide-able furniture, moveable walls, swappable features — but also over the longer-term, to accommodate different life stages and changing circumstances? And if absolutely everything comes to us at home what will that mean for community?
Design By AI
Will artificial intelligence supplant every human role, even the most creative?
This week I sampled two AI interfaces. With my kids, we gave the DALL-E software, a written prompt and it created an image (which on the second attempt was surprisingly good) for us in response. They felt they had created a piece of art.
Then I saw a new interior design service from https://interiorai.com whereby you upload a photo and the service instantly gives you a vision of your room in various styles — Bohemian, Tropical, Art-Deco etc. I don’t think I’ll be doing the suggested ‘Tribal’ makeover any time soon, but these fledgling AI applications begged the question what role for human creativity? What future for Lawrence Llewleyn-Bowen?
These interactions had minimal user-input. But we can expect future design-AIs to track our behaviours, to listen to our conversations, and to scour our data to discern our preferences. Will we come home to find a new piece of furniture ordered for us to better suit our lifestyle? Or tins of paint and a proposed new colour scheme to improve our wellbeing?
Artificial intelligence can evidently enhance human decision-making for architecture, design, and place-making. Which of the creative professions will it completely supplant?
Smart Home Surveillance
As Facebook goes big on the Metaverse and living in a virtual-reality world, Amazon is taking a different tack which is all about them layering digital around you in the real world.
They’ve just launched a new product Halo Rise, a sleep tracker that monitors and measures you while you slumber and uses AI to calculate the type of sleep you’ve had. This brings the prospect of being monitored by Amazon when we read (Kindle), watch (Fire), shop (Prime/Fresh), have visitors (Ring), talk at home (Echo) and ask questions (Alexa). They’ve bought automated vacuum cleaner Roomba which will gather data about the dimensions of rooms and the type of furniture in our homes. Now, the company want to gather data you when you sleep.
The consumer will be enmeshed in a digital web, with devices all around them, always on, always gathering data. The machine learning and algorithms will make predictive decisions about what you want and need before you even know it. One single company will control all this.
I’ve worked a lot on smart cities and using digital technology to improve infrastructure and services. Quite rightly, there’s been lots of scrutiny and debates about consent and being surveilled in public places. People seem to care about privacy and rights when the data is being collected by democratically elected local government. At the same time, with smart homes, consumers are opting into being surrounded by ambient technology, silently gathering data, understanding them intimately, and then — imperceptibly — shaping their lives.
