Det smarta hemmets mundanisering

Abstract

The smart home around 2020 is based on interconnected software-equipped things that through automation are supposed to deliver new pleasures and conveniences. This technological makeover of domestic settings is characterised by consumption of things that are promoted as novel and spectacular. If successful, these things are then gradually transformed into ignored infrastructure, into paraphernalia of routinised everyday life. This is a process of mundanisation, through which complex technologies are seldom domesticated. Instead they are integrated in everyday life while still being incomprehensible and beyond control. I illustrate this process with examples from a smart lighting system.