We were promised a seamless technological experience that allowed us to float through a home that anticipated our every need. But now the median smart home has at least one timer going off somewhere in the kitchen and no one is sure which device it’s coming from. A child is asking the voice assistant a series of hypothetical questions that are putting the whole home’s algorithm in jeopardy, and one light in particular refuses to turn on when summoned. A decade on, there are displays on our kitchen counters for timers, photo galleries, and ordering paper towels. That gap in performance promise and the projection of a premium design aesthetic is hard to ignore.
Instead, the push to incorporate technology and automation into our homes has often taken a decidedly tech-first, human-second design approach. But ambient technology is still possible. It just requires putting the human before the hardware.
Friction-Free Automation
For many, the smart home starts in the kitchen: It’s where people gather to get things done with their hands, where everything has a purpose, and you shouldn’t be touching your phone to start a podcast or set a timer while you’re kneading dough. Unfortunately, as the years and update cycles have elapsed, it has started to feel as if that vision is slipping away.
New product features have added bloat and complexity that users report they haven’t sought, and depending on when you purchased your gear and how fastidious you are about updates, it’s easy to find yourself stranded between ecosystems—managing lighting in one app, pushing firmware updates to the refrigerator in another. One survey found that 29 percent of users actually spend more time managing their home with smart devices than they did before. A well-designed kitchen, especially at the luxury end of the spectrum, shouldn’t require its own sysadmin. The more useful argument, it turns out, isn’t that high-tech means more tech—it’s that the best of it disappears entirely into the service of the user.
That service starts at the platform level. Invisible, ambient technology is supposed to make life easier, or at least more efficient. If your goal is to turn on the lights and get the oven preheating as you pull up to the house after work, that dance shouldn’t require three apps and a prayer that it works. Each system needs to be tightly integrated. That means that rather than developing yet another standard for a new product launch, appliances designed for longevity are increasingly ensuring compatibility with existing market leaders either natively or through a readily available software or hardware bridge. Focusing on interoperability provides users with more options, less friction, and—in case a service provider ceases operations—there’s less of a chance that the product ends up in the landfill. Additionally, on-device AI can mean faster responses and less dependence on a cloud connection.
The Blueprint
Once the technological foundation layer is established, we can build our considered home atop it with little tech debt. Ideally the foundation layer is built into a sandbox that we already play in, like the mobile operating system or other wider subscription service.
Appliances require more aesthetic and financial consideration, so there’s less wiggle room for a test-and-learn methodology. It’s also a case where you would put a premium on the technology fading into the background, allowing the greater house-wide design decisions to take center stage and integrate into the flow of family activities. Consider getting a roast chicken cooked while finishing the laundry and watching a movie. Using a wireless probe paired to a smart oven and guided cooking app allows a certain amount of “set-it-and-forget-it” confidence for a well-cooked bird. The washing machine and dryer gently chug through your weekly backlog of laundry, sending an alert to your phone when they’ve completed the task. The status of all three processes can be tracked from a single app. Some systems will even float alerts to the TV to ensure you actually move the laundry from the washer to the dryer.
Beyond actively using these features, ambient connected systems such as the SmartHQ™ app employed by New Zealand–based luxury appliance brand Fisher & Paykel, allow users to extend their investments with alerts for filter changes, service needs, or firmware updates collected in one place. Taking these settings from screens on the products themselves and collapsing them into one holistic ecosystem on a mobile device or home hub enables more parts of our homes to communicate with one another. And when something goes wrong or needs explaining, the answer is in the same place. SmartHQ™ integrates an AI assistant for exactly this: less time hunting through the manual, more time using their gear. When it all comes together, cognitive loads can be reduced, and things just work.
Setting the Temperature
For designers, these tools offer granular control—tuning both performance and aesthetics to the specific life being lived in a space. Schedules can be set to start the dishwasher for off-peak power use or monitor a long sous vide cook. For visual integration, in the case of Fisher & Paykel, there are finishes designed to recede into the surrounding architecture without having to integrate an industrial-presenting gadget just because a resident wants a state-of-the-art home. When appliances eschew complex controls and on-board screens, they can be seamlessly integrated into cabinetry. If your preferences skew toward the minimal, you can at least take the focus away from a glowing LED screen and highlight the entirety of the mise en scene. Or, you can lean into the professional kitchen aesthetic and let the hardware announce itself (the high-tech internals included). But for the technology to be truly invisible, those internals have to connect and do their job every time.
Over 10 years following the launch of the first smart home protocols, a combination of platform consolidation, cross-platform support, and design choice is allowing us to build homes that improve over time with software-upgradeable platforms that extend product life rather than forcing replacement cycles. The near future of the connected home is beginning to look like an intelligent ecosystem that lets us spend more time living and entertaining, and less time trying to figure out which timer refuses to be cancelled.
Discover Fisher & Paykel’s perspective on thoughtful technology and the future of connected living at www.fisherpaykel.com.
