What does the smart home look like for a residential community of elderly people? What features does your smart home need if you have 15 cats, live on a houseboat or without electrical outlets? To address these and similar questions and concerns in the development of new technologies and applications for the home, innovative participatory design processes are needed. These will be captured and tested in the project. We invite users to create the smart home of the future in co-design workshops. Together with people from different walks of life, we will speculate which routines, experiences and wishes belong to their individual smart home. We will collect the craziest, most boring and most dangerous ideas for the smart home and publish them in a small book. We will use this book of alternative futures to evaluate and criticize the wishes and dreams for the home of the future together with its future inhabitants.
The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), funding no. 16SV8609. In this project, I’m happy to collaborate with my colleague Arne Berger from Hochschule Anhalt.
Selected project publications:
Becker, Alexa; Haupt, Benedikt; Berger, Arne & Pentzold, Christian (2022): Future Home Stories: Participatory Predicaments and Methodological Scaffolding in the Narrative Speculation on Alternative Domestic Lives. In: Digital Creativity, 33(3), 276-294.