The Not Very Smart Home

A $99 nightlight that listens for your $20 smoke detector, then calls your smartphone? JL

Allison Arieff reports in the New York Times:

The Internet of Things is pitched as good for the consumer. But is it? At this point, it seems exceptionally awesome for those companies working on products for it. The benefit to the average homeowner pales in relation to the benefit for the companies poised to accumulate infinite amounts of actionable data.

At a design conference recently, I was introduced to Leeo, a new product that I initially understood to be a reboot of something really in need of a redesign: the smoke detector. As the designer explained his process, I quickly came to understand that Leeo was nothing of the sort. It was a gadget, a night light that “listens” for your smoke detector to go off and then calls your smartphone to let you know your house might be on fire.

So, to “improve” a $20 smoke alarm, the designer opted to add a $99 night light and a several-hundred-dollar smartphone.

This is not good design.

Alas, Leeo is no isolated case, but rather representative of a whole spectrum of products designed for the so-called Smart Home, products integral to the much-lauded, much-misunderstood Internet of Things. (You know, that thing where a bunch of other things will be connected to the Internet.) Like you, I once had many products that each fulfilled a separate function: a landline, a cellphone, a camera, a video recorder, a stereo, a calendar. Now, I have one product that does all of those things — a smartphone. This level of product integration was a revolution in product design. We can debate the extent to which technology does or doesn’t improve our lives, but it is fair to say that in terms of usability, convenience and sustainability, one product doing the work of five or six is a win.

Not, however, if you’re in the business of selling stereos or cameras. Or monetizing the data obtained from their use.

A veritable museum of Leeo-ish products is currently on display in San Francisco at Target’s Open House, a new store designed to attract folks before they head to the multiplex upstairs — but more specifically, to give Target a piece of the plethora of disruptive innovation happening in the Bay Area by helping start-ups bring their products to market.

What the products on display have in common is that they don’t solve problems people actually have. Technology is integrated not because it is necessary, but because the technology exists to integrate it — and because it will enable companies to sell you stuff you never knew you were missing.

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Among the items at Open House:

Whistle, $99. This attaches to your pet’s collar and allows you to set a daily activity goal customized to your dog’s age, breed and weight — and then share that information with other pet owners via social media.

Refuel, $39.99. A black plastic sensor-enabled ring that monitors your propane tank levels and sends you notifications when propane is low so that, its inventor says, you’ll never “get caught off guard by BBQ bummer again.”

94Fifty, $199.95. A “smart” basketball that promises to improve your jump shot.

Inside the Target shop are domestic room displays that look very Philippe Starck circa 1999 and appear intended, inexplicably, to evoke Victorian painted ladies, albeit in frosted plastic. These vignettes are supposed to show how these various products might play nicely together (though many of them — much like electric car charging stations — in fact don’t, as each manufacturer is developing different technologies). For instance, Jawbone, the newest incarnation of the popular fitness tracker, will, when you lie down to go to sleep, trigger the doors to lock and the lights to turn off.

Another example shown was the Mimo, a smart baby monitor built into a onesie ($199) that takes helicopter parenting to new heights (or lows). Mimo notifies you when your baby wakes up or changes her breathing pattern, body position or skin temperature, and provides a timeline of your baby’s sleep patterns on your tablet or smartphone. When Mimo is connected to other devices in your home and discerns that your baby is stirring, the lights turn on, coffee begins brewing and some Baby Mozart starts playing on the stereo. Given the erratic wake-up times of my child when she was an infant, I can only imagine the delight all this activity might bring to new parents at midnight, 3 and 5:30 a.m.

In Target’s news release, Casey Carl, the company’s chief strategy and innovation officer, says, “We see Internet of Things as a megatrend on the horizon. We know it’s going to generate huge value.”

Value for whom is the question.

To be fair, many of these objects are, as the local parlance would put it, in beta, because Open House is meant to be a laboratory, not just a smart-home version of the Apple store. The “community space” is for early user testing of these products.

This being the case, may I make a plea for R&D in four major areas? 1) integration of functions 2) usefulness 3) sustainability and 4) privacy/security.

The move toward the Smart City — programs ranging from 311 to Comstat and sensor-enabled trash collection — is very much about using data to improve efficiency, reduce costs and make better use of resources. This has not carried over to the realm of the Smart Home; instead, the tendency has been to throw excess technological capability at every possible gadget without giving any thought to whether it’s really necessary.

Integration. Instead of one gadget for each function, why not one gadget, many functions? My treasured aunt and uncle, serious cooks with a tiny galley kitchen in Manhattan, have a hard and fast rule: no single-function kitchen items allowed (i.e., fondue pots or asparagus cookers). It’s a good rule and gets back to that product-integration idea.

Usability. Focus on technology that solves issues people actually face. While it’s true, as Steve Jobs famously said, that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” let’s not give them stuff that’s ridiculous. Work harder to discover people’s domestic pain points: I anxiously await the creation of some truly smart things for the home, like a self-emptying dishwasher or a laundry-folding dryer.

Sustainability. Smart cities worry about their ecological footprint; smart homes, seemingly not at all. Every gadget in the so-called Smart Home is plastic and, last time I checked, this material has not become a renewable resource. And I shudder to think of the planned obsolescence built into these objects. I am not the first to lament that the efforts focused on less than essential “innovations” in Silicon Valley has led to brain drain in other arenas (medical research, et al). Redirecting some of the R&D money and energy currently devoted to the cool factor toward reducing waste and material usage and improving manufacturing processes instead — now that would be smart.

Privacy and Security. Every one of these items is connected to the Internet, and therefore all of your usage patterns are recorded for posterity — to the delight of pet food manufacturers, propane tank distributors, grill manufacturers, designers of baby linens and locksmiths. Our computers and smartphones already have a frightening amount of information about us — what we buy, what we watch, what ailments we fear we have. The connected home increases the amount of that information exponentially, yet scant to zero efforts are in place to protect consumer privacy and security. You may be able

to get your phone to project bright colors if your window sensor detects a burglar, but what is protecting you from your phone?

I asked a young man working at the Target store how visitors felt about their every action being tracked and he said that they’d come to accept it. And that was that.

The Internet of Things is pitched as good for the consumer. But is it? At this point, it seems exceptionally awesome for those companies working on products for it. The benefit to the average homeowner pales dramatically in relation to the benefit for the companies poised to accumulate infinite amounts of actionable data. You and I benefit by determining whether our dog got enough exercise last Wednesday. Is that a fair tradeoff? Doesn’t feel like it.

Experts estimate that the Internet of Things will consist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020. It’s coming whether we want it to or not, so let’s focus on making “smart” a whole lot smarter.