My smart home: an auto-ethnography of learning to live with smart technologies

Abstract

Smart home technology is expected to be widespread in the future and to accommodate a green transition to reduce and time-shift energy consumption. However, smart technologies also have social consequences, which are important to understand. At a basic level, we need to know more about learning to live with these technologies and how they influence our everyday practices and routines. Providing in-depth longitudinal insights into these processes, this paper presents an auto-ethnography of living with smart home technology: a 20-month diary kept by one of the authors. The paper uses theories of practice to investigate details of learning processes when interacting with three selected technologies: smart alarm and lighting management, smart control of heating, and a smart electric vehicle (EV). Theories of learning have a well-established tradition within theories of practice, and the concept of “knowing how to go on” and the concept of practical intelligibility are central in this work. This paper investigates the adoption of new smart technologies and how they interact with learning processes in different material and social contexts. Such an approach can lay the groundwork for further empirical research with a broader set of materials. It can also provide knowledge to assist in the design of better technologies and in developing policies and regulations to promote this.

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“…The four researchers used autoethnography to capture processes that cannot so easily be captured with other traditional ethnographic methods. This includes, for instance, exploring bodily sensations, emotional responses, meaning-making, and self-making [66][67][68]. Autoethnography has been applied to various domains, including studying how relations developed between users and digital technologies, for example, smart homes [66] or personal heritage soundscapes [67].…”