The Old is New Again in Tomorrow’s Smart Homes

Destinations like EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World and media like The Jetsons​​ embodied these ideals by depicting a fully automated future. The futuristic homes of yesteryear were presented as an escape from the demands of work—a consumer fantasy of labor-free living. [1]

Today’s futuristic smart home promotions offer a different domestic automation fantasy to achieve work/life balance. Corporations like Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Samsung still target suburban culture as the primary beneficiary of home automation technologies, but they infuse smart home promotions with visions of a data-managed domestic life. Consumers are told that to achieve work/life balance they must upgrade current appliances, furnishings, and other household goods with sensors, processors, and transmitters enabling data-driven management of the home. [2] In theory, these smart home devices will help consumers be better prepared, more rested, and focused on work by reducing distractions from domestic life.

The problem is that the tech industry’s contemporary vision for tomorrow’s smart homes demands that homeowners surrender their privacy in exchange for simple conveniences and optimize the home to better suit the logistics of a global supply chain. They boast that smart homes of tomorrow will contain such wondrous devices as urinalysis toilets, [3] nutritionist refrigerators, [4] and mood-enhancing mirrors. [5] They promise homeowners that smart devices can help alleviate anxieties like forgetting to close the garage door on the way to work; streamline pre- and post-work domestic routines; and reduce energy costs or climate impact through more efficient environmental controls. To gain these conveniences through smart home devices, consumers must install a biometric surveillance apparatus inside the home that tracks and catalogs their habits and behaviors. Companies then use the data to predict consumer behavior, customize advertisements, and more efficiently manage the supply chain. However, when we look historically at smart homes, things are not as new as they might first appear.

After nearly a half century of “disruption and innovation” the tech industry is still largely selling the same smart home automation services and features. Mid-century smart homes were envisioned as fully built environments, hard-wired into the architecture of single-family homes. By the 1980s, the budding tech industry learned that coordinating with the home construction industry created logistical and financial barriers, which inhibited the widespread adoption of smart homes. Unity Systems—the largest smart home company during that time period—only has about 7,500 homes still in operation today compared to around 145 million total housing units in the US.

Leading home construction companies around the world express little interest in the old fully built smart homes. Stanley Martin, one of the largest home construction companies in the US, barely acknowledges smart homes on their corporate website. Though they do promote a cleverly branded play on the smart home concept with their “SMart” Selected Home line as a way to customize interior design options, choose unique floor plans, improve homebuyer experience, and “better optimize the supply chain.” [6] Even their Japanese parent company, Daiwa House Group, similarly lacks references to smart homes despite being one of “the leading innovators in home construction technology” and holding strong market positions in freight logistics and advanced robotics. [7]

Instead of fully built wired homes, today’s smart homes are created by wirelessly networking each smart home device independent of the home’s design, architecture, or construction. This piecemeal home automation bypasses many of the financial and logistical barriers of aligning new home construction with the tech industry’s pace of technological change. The vast majority of these new smart home devices continue to facilitate the same remote control over environment, appliances, and media as the old, wired homes, but now require homeowners to surrender privacy and domestic autonomy from work for such conveniences.

A home optimized for work and data-driven management will fail to deliver on its promise of work/life balance just as older domestic automation technologies failed to create more leisure time. As Ruth Cowan describes in More Work for Mother, many domestic appliances that claimed to save time in the 1950s and ‘60s actually made more work for homemakers because they changed the perceptions for cleanliness, food preparation, and other maintenance chores. [8] For example, when the vacuum automated sweeping, people began expecting cleaner floors resulting in homemakers actually spending more time vacuuming than they did sweeping with brooms.

It will be difficult—if not impossible—to find work/life balance in the smart homes of tomorrow because a data-driven home optimized for supply chain logistics will no longer be a refuge from work. Smart home promotions have been framing the home as an inefficiency within the global flow of products, finance, and information since the early 2010s. [9] In these visions of the future, domestic life is treated as a distraction that needs to be managed to accommodate work. Global supply chains involve complex logistical coordination between materials, manufacturing, and distribution while navigating geopolitical alliances and antagonisms. Businesses can coordinate with other businesses reasonably well, but consumers rarely behave in rational and predictable ways. The tech industry currently promotes a vision of data-driven living through smart home devices in order to make domestic habits quantitatively legible, and thus more predictable, for managing supply chains.

Despite being written in 1950 when smart home promotions still promised a life of leisure through automation, Ray Bradbury’s disturbingly prescient short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains” describes the kind of optimized smart homes found in Google Home or Alexa advertisements.[10] On August 4, 2026, a smart home in Allendale, California executes its daily domestic routines of cooking, cleaning, and maintenance. At 7:00 am the house alerts the family to wake up for work and school. It announces the day’s events and confirms that automatic bill payments were successfully processed. The house prepares, serves, and cleans up breakfast. Bradbury describes a smart home so optimized for productivity and profit that the house fails to even register that its occupants are dead. All that remains of the house’s once Rockwellesque inhabitants are the family’s shadows scorched onto the wall by a nuclear apocalypse. In telling the story of an automated house reproducing the suburban rhythms in a dead world, Bradbury warns us that smart homes have never been designed to value the human life within their walls. 



Creating meaningful human dwellings in the smart homes of tomorrow will require us to imagine new ways of balancing work and life that do not optimize homes for the global supply chain, or feed the tech industry’s insatiable appetite for data at the cost of our privacy. Fail as it did, at least yesteryear’s smart homes had an emancipatory labor politics that promised to liberate suburban women from a life of unpaid domestic work. The futuristic smart homes of tomorrow have no emancipatory politics, nor visions of social change through technology. They simply aim to optimize the status quo.

If the meaning of the contemporary home is undergoing a transformation because of new smart home technologies, then future generations may look back on what is happening now and ask: what could have been different? We owe it to them to question what we are giving up in our lives for simple conveniences in a data-managed smart home. What other values might we prioritize in the home, which protect the privacy of domestic life and the autonomy that makes the home a distinct space from work? If we do not reimagine smart homes, future generations may find themselves living in homes so optimized for work and supply chain logistics that they treat human beings and their shadows with equal indifference.

Notes:

[1] Heckman, Davin. 2008. A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[2] Bunz, Mercedes, and Graham Meikle. 2017. The Internet of Things. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

[3] Armitage, Hanae, 2020, “‘Smart toilet’ monitors for signs of disease.”

[4] Luo, Suhuai , Jesse S. Jin, and Jiaming Li. 2009. “A Smart Fridge with an Ability to Enhance Health and Enable Better Nutrition.” International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering 4 (2): 69-80.

[5] Baracoda, 2024, “CES 2024: Baracoda unveils BMind, the world’s first smart mirror for mental wellness,” https://baracoda.com/resources/press/baracoda-unveils-bmind-smart-mirror-for-mental-wellness.

[6] Stanley Martin. 2025. “SMart Selected Homes.” Accessed Feb 14, 2025. https://www.stanleymartin.com/about-our-homes/smart-selected-homes.

[7] Daiwa House Group. 2025. “Daiwa House Group Company Information.” Accessed Feb 14, 2025. https://www.daiwahouse.com/.

[8] Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.

[9] Rottinghaus, Adam Richard. 2021. “Smart Homes and the New White Futurism.” Journal of Futures Studies 25 (4): 45-56. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.6531/JFS.202106_25(4).0004

[10] Bradbury, Ray. 1950. “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Collier’s Weekly.