The big challenge to tackle in the future of smart homes

Blake McEldowney

Director of Design, Mormedi

Last Friday night, Mormedi’s CEO (Jaime Moreno) and I, had the chance to give insights about the future of connected homes to agroup of participants at the 2021 Virtual Makeathon, organised by the Design Engineering Society, the departmental society for the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London.

After giving a Smart Home trends summary and having the opportunity to listen to interesting success stories from Dyson, P&G, Tewke, and the Imperial College London itself, we were asked to choose the one challenge for the future of homes that we thought had to be considered by the ten teams that competed at the event. A difficult question, as there are many issues to tackle in this field.

But the two words that came to my mind were Value and Protection.

How do we ensure people are able to get true value from these services whilst being able to protect themselves?

Being connected to outside services is critical aspect of Smart Homes and users are being asked to give up personal information or are having their behaviours tracked to access some of these new features.

There is a lot of tracking and tracing, many companies are using the data for other purposes than what they state upfront.

So how do we put control in the hands of users?

Creating better services without having to pay a heavy price for their data security.

As with most creative process, the Makers are challenged to dive deep into their understanding of the Smart Home and to anticipate the real value for the customer and to ask the reasons why behind their ideas.

Another parallel point in creating real value is more of an industry challenge, but worth considering while the Makers build out and evolve their ideas.

How do we build ecosystems with Interoperability and standardisation, while ensuring these standards don’t hinder innovation.

How do you coordinate these larger ecosystems of different devices and services that come into the home? How do we ensure companies are ethical in their access to and use of customer data?

Creating real value and protection within the Smart Home.

If you are interested in discussing how best to understand and design devices and services for the changing needs of consumers, e-mail me to blake@mormedi.com.

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