Nils Ehrenberg
Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
Smart technology turns the home into an active agent, which shifts the power structures within the household. This paper examines how initiators of smart technology insert their vision of the good life into households, and how these technologies exert power over the residents. Through a thematic analysis of interviews with five households, we consider Foucault’s theory on disciplinary power to examine how smart home technologies shape the experience of the home by shifting the flow of information and thereby reify power structures. Results indicate that the implementation of smart technology can affect access to shared spaces, constrain interactions, and predefine practices thereby establishing hierarchies within the household. We turn the discussion towards ethical challenges concerning control, whose problems the smart home is concerned with, and how the smart home embeds itself in the household. We conclude with design considerations and future work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445058
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)