Smart homes: domestic futurity as Infrastructure

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the way that the Brookfield Residential (BR) Smart Home constructs domestic futurity, or a set of cultural practices and meanings pertaining to a mediated, technologically-advanced home and homelife. The BR Smart Home is a new mass-market smart domestic product produced in partnership with retail and logistics hegemon, Amazon. The Smart Home offers customizable, luxury smart living, to include the traditional (stainless steel appliances, a butler’s pantry) and the transitional (a drone heliopad, a new ‘Drop Zone’ room for Amazon and other deliveries). As an exemplar of mass-market smart home technology, the Smart Home communicates the durability of traditional conceptions of domesticity in the smart home age. At the same time, the BR Smart Home reveals the material shifts in domestic spaces goaded by new technological and economic developments. The Smart Homes’ changing spatial configurations reflect upon and intensify infrastructures that fortify divisions between the Smart Homeowners and marginalized others. Drawing on fieldwork completed at several BR Smart Homes, I argue that domestic futurity is a form of infrastructure that is (1) so well distributed as to be frequently hidden, (2) agential and transitional, and (3) subject to cultural transformation while simultaneously upholding residues of traditional domesticity.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart home
• domesticity
• domestic futurity
• platform labor
• cultural infrastructure

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Brookfield Residential and its DC Metro-based employees for granting her permission to tour and photograph their Smart Homes. The author also wishes to thank the editors and anonymous reviewer, Marlene Pierce, Lora Kirmer, Caitlin Bruce, Michaela Frischherz, Lisa Silvestri, Kim Singletary, and Emily Winderman for engaging earlier drafts of the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although other scholars, including Heintz (2015) and McHugh (2015), have used the term ‘domestic futurity,’ I am, to my knowledge, the first at advancing this particular definition.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a Faculty Enhancement Award at Kansas State University.

Notes on contributors

Heather Suzanne Woods

Heather Suzanne Woods is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Kansas State University. Her research examines the relationship between communication, culture, and technological innovation. Her current research concerns the smart home and the future of housing.