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Good morning

Imagine…

Your alarm clock peacefully wakes you up at 5am. As you remove the bed covers, and your feet touch the floor, a suptle glow of light illuminates your path to the bathroom and robe, allowing you to change into your gym clothes in an unobtrusive, dimmed light.

While you’re getting changed, the automated pet feeder releases fifty grams of dry food for your cat’s breakfast. As you leave for the gym, your front door automatically unlocks, and securely locks silently closes behind you.

After a high-intensity work out, you arrive back home, just after sunrise. The front door automatically unlocks, and you are greeted by your satisfied cats. A soft glow of sunlight bathes the room through the sheer drapes, as the heavier, block-out curtains magically part.

As you enter the bathroom, the shower knowingly turns on to a refreshing thirty degrees, at just the right pressure to sooth your body. The radio softly plays, updating you with the seven o’clock news. Steam is queitly extracted by the overhead fan keeping the mirror condensation free.

As you turn off the shower, and dry off, robe space and shelves illuminate, helping you select your outfit for the day. Over the sounds of the radio, you hear the grinding of coffee beans, as your coffee machine prepares the ideal latte to kick start your day.

Walking into the kitchen and living room, the sheer window drapes automatically open to reveal a glorious morning. The radio is seamlessly transferred from the bathroom to the kitchen, and your home maintains a comfortable 22 degrees as you enjoy your morning coffee.

After breakfast, you gather your work belongings to leave home, saying goodbye to the cats, with the door quietly closing and locking behind you.

Everything just happens, integrating seamless with your lifestyle to start your day.

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What is a smart home?

The words ‘Smart Home’ (sometimes known as home automation, intelligent home etc.), gets mentioned a lot, and can be confusing for many.

I avoid using ‘smart home’ (or variations of), as it often implies the addition of unnecessary, complicated, cumbersome electronic technology solutions, that might require a rocket science degree to operate, and an unlimited financial budget to implement.

All homes have the ability to be smart, on different levels. Keeping in mind that technology doesn’t neccessarily have to be electronic, houses have evolved to incorporate various technologies, and have become more electronic as our awareness to have them better connected to ourselves and the outside world is realised.

All homes have multiple services and utilities; electricity, gas, water, security, television, internet, etc. that can be integarted and connected to be provide better comfort, convenience, security, and energy efficiency.

Imagine your home being customised based on what you are doing at particular times of the day: Lighting automatically dims to provide a relaxing ambience at night, or becomes brighter for dedicated tasks. Heating and cooling automatically turns on and adjusts to the optimal temperature. Your home can automatically adapt to make your living environment more comfortable.

We are very predictable in our daily lives – from when we wake up, exercise, go to work, return home, eat, relax, and sleep. Many systems in and around the home can be automated, based on our daily routines: Blinds and curtains can open at sunrise, and close at night, or close when it’s too bright or too hot. Lights can turn on when you arrive home at night, or turn off when a room is vacant or nobody is home, providing new levels of convenience.

The security and safety of your home, family, and property can be greatly enhanced. Outdoor lighting can automatically illuminate your property to deter unwanted activity, and turn on at night when there is movement. Keyless entry frees you from fumbling for keys when you come home, with automated lighting illuminating your home. Video cameras can not only record, but provide personal alerts to notify you in real time when there is irregular activity, even when you are not at home.

A home can know exactly when it is day and night, summer and winter, or when it is occupied. Power and lights can automatically turn on and off, and adjust to the optimal brightness, only when needed. Heating and cooling self-adjusts to maintain ideal comfort levels. Your home’s energy usage can be optimised to incorporate alternate energy such as solar, battery storage, and electric vehicle charging. Controlling power improves energy efficiency – saving money, and reducing carbon footprints.

By definition, a home that is smart or intelligent, can change it’s state in response to various situations. With many homes already having various technology products and systems, the benefits of having the right technologies integrated can be easily realised, to seamlessly connect our homes and lifestyle.

With developments in artifical intelligence and machine learning, we are getting closer to having technologies learn and respond, based on our habits, routines, and past experiences. For our homes, this will be the next exciting step to improve our lifestyle.

In the same way that cars evolved to incorporate electronic technologies, similarly, houses will follow. Electric windows, automated heating and cooling, handsfree communication, and improved vehicle safety are examples that are so common that they are now standard in modern cars.

Features and benefits of home and lifestyle technologies are endless, as they can be customised for your lifestyle. With the right advice, technology can greatly benefit our lifestyle, with improvements in comfort, convenience, security, energy efficiency.

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Ditch the switch

“While every person is unique, human behaviour is predictable” ~ Anon

Our daily lives are mostly predictable, or at least very regular; from the moment we wake, to when we sleep.

A well designed smart home can take advantage of regularity, to automate everyday tasks and routines, and mostly eliminate the need for manual control, and ditching the switch.

Connected power and lighting

“Power and lighting control are the foundation of any smart home or smart building” – Simon Lakey

A smart home must have a connected power and lighting system, that will include at least: intelligent sensors, a scheduler, and a task engine.

Intelligent sensors detect motion and light levels in a room or area, to automatically control power and lighting. Sensors allow lights to operate only when required, monitoring  motion, presence and absence, and the level of natural light.

A scheduler assists in the automation of regular routines and tasks. Systems know the geographic location of the house; knowing time, day, month and year, sunrise and sunset, seasons, daylight savings, and holidays. In-built timers automatically control power and lighting at predetermined times, and lengths of time.

Powerful microprocessor task engines are distributed within the system to bring everything together, to work automatically. Using conditional logic, information from sensors and other inputs are compared and evaluated with the scheduler to make the magic of the smart home happen.

Old habits, new ways

For almost 140 years, since the invention of the electric light, we have been conditioned to manually switch power and lights, to initiate a cause and effect.

A new building utilises more lighting options than ever before, to provide architectural, feature and task lighting. Lights should be grouped into logical channels, areas and presets, to create usable scenes.

A well designed smart home needs to consider the use of each room or area, and provide adequate presets and scenes to enable required functionality.

Presets and scenes can be triggered by a combination of sensor activity, schedules and conditional logic.

Ditch the switch?

For a smart home to be truly ‘smart’, there needs to be a focus on intuitiveness, simplicity and usability.

The modern smart home already uses less switches than a traditional home, as there is less need to use switches as we traditionally have. We no longer need switches in every room, when sensors can detect presence and absense, and task engines can automate regular routines and tasks.

With careful consideration of the home owner and resident’s lifestyle, we may not need an abundance of manual switches. If there is a specific need, there are intuitive control panels, mobile applications and other solutions, such as voice control, that can compliment an intelligent connected power and lighting system.

If you’re still unsure about cutting ties to switches, you can easily allow for networked switches by pre-wiring an appropriate data cable, that can be readily accessed if required.

The time has come to ditch the switch.

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Design for the Future, Now

electric-home-of-the-future

 

About 6-8 millions years ago, the common ancestors of humans and apes went their seperate evolutionary ways. The human brain became considerably larger by having the unique skills that helped develop it. Ever since these early days, humans have found solutions to problems, and found new methods and inventions to become more efficient. In our quest to populate Earth and the universe beyond, science and technology that will take us into the future.

As we progress further into the 21st century, we truly live in a technological world. Technology is a solution to being efficient, to overcome problems, to being connected. We have had a century of many technological advances and modern conveniences that provided us with time saving appliances and information hungry devices. We now live in a connected world, where appliances and devices are connected to each other by a huge network – the cloud. Welcome to the Internet of Things.

The early 20th century saw the introduction of domestic technology, or household machines. These were typically appliances that made life easier (e.g. sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.). In 1939 Popular Mechanics Magazine predicted the future with a cover and article The Electric Home of the Future, that depicted many modern day appliances.

Early adopters created their own ‘smart homes’ (a loose term by todays standards) in the 1960s after the visions of the dreamers of the 1950s. The first home automation machines arrived in the late 1960s in the form of the home computers, that were very large, and very expensive. Such machines or computers, could be programmed to perform simple tasks – turn appliances on/off, adjust temperature etc.

In the 1970s, the grandfather of home automation, X10 became available – a simple, but unreliable system that could control appliances over power lines. The 1980s and 1990s saw the development of networked systems (e.g. lighting control and wireless data) and digital media (e.g. Compact Disc by Philips and Sony). The Apple iPod arrived in the early 2000s, followed my smart phones with revolutionary touch screen user interfaces. The rest is history, as devices become even more convenient and connected.

There are technological steps we need to take in order to advance into the future. For our personal living, we currently enjoy the convenience of smart appliances (e.g. lighting systems, digital music systems etc.) and smart devices (e.g. mobile phones, tablets, wearables etc.), that when integrated, provide the basics of a smart home.

In a smart home, multiple appliances and systems are connected to each other, and controlled by smart devices. With the progression of the Internet of Things, smart homes will evolve and become connected homes within smart cities.

Home owners, specifiers, and other influential stakeholders need to be aware of the latest smart home technologies, and implement at least the core systems – power, lighting and data, to best future proof the home.

If we design for today, we will only have homes for today, and not for the future. Design for the future, now.