The smart home: a visual analysis

Abstract

In this article, the authors engage with visual representations of smart homes, examining whether and how these media constitute emergent narratives of Western meanings of home. They do so by reporting on the findings of visual content and semiotic analysis of smart home images published in architectural media. They identify two modalities of smart home images published in these media – images in which smart home technologies are visible and those in which they are implicitly hidden. They read these images as constituting two semiotic myths of home: as familiar places of belonging for both people and smart objects, and as exceptional spaces of luxury associated with freedom from domestic labor delivered by smart technologies. They argue that these myths are central to securing social acceptance of the smart home by signifying it to be both trustworthy and aspirational.

Keywords

architectural media home smart home visual semiotics

Introduction

The ‘smart home’ has recently emerged as a nascent configuration within the broader ‘landscapes of home’ (Duncan and Lambert, 2004). It is defined as a unit of residential housing infused with ordinary domestic objects – refrigerators, toasters, doorbells, toothbrushes, electrical plugs and sockets – that have the capacity to connect with each other over wireless networks. This connectivity is seen to render the smart home capable of ‘anticipat[ing] and respond[ing] to’ the desires and requirements of its residents (Aldrich, 2003: 17; Lupton et al., 2021; Maalsen, 2020), such as when smart thermostats learn ambient indoor temperature preferences and autonomously regulate domestic heating and cooling processes. Contemporary smart homes have their roots in 1990s ‘wired homes’ (Maalsen, 2020: 1535), which began to establish themselves in popular culture when a range of publications – including lifestyle magazines, newspapers, and computer periodicals – disseminated images showing how computers could be integrated into domestic spaces (Chambers, 2020; Pink et al., 2017). While today’s smart homes differ from 1990s antecedents by virtue of the ubiquitous extension of digital network connectivity to domestic devices beyond computers (Maalsen, 2020), visual media continue to play an important role in propagating the smart home as a novel and desirable way of designing and inhabiting residential spaces. In depicting realistic appropriations of and engagements with smart home devices in domestic spaces, images of smart homes circulated through visual media make their staged interiors and exteriors appear both desirable and highly achievable for residents (Lupton et al., 2021).

Our particular interest in visual representations of smart homes is motivated by our distinct yet complementary pedagogies: one of us trained as an architect, with a specific interest in smart home design, and the other is an academic geographer, a discipline for which the spaces and meanings of home are longstanding subjects of inquiry. These pedagogies informed for us the following research question of mutual interest: do visual representations of smart homes reproduce existing meanings and/or constitute new narratives of ‘home’ in Western ontologies and visual discourses? To answer this question, we engage with images of smart homes circulated within one specific genre of visual media – architectural trade publications. Smart home exteriors and interiors feature prominently within these publications, ultimately informing public imaginaries of smart homes and identifying pathways and scenarios through which these idealized visions can come to be realized by consumers within their own residential dwellings.

Drawing on the results of a visual content analysis of a corpus of smart home images sourced from a selection of trade architectural publications, we identify two dominant modalities of visual representations of smart homes: images in which smart devices and appliances are visible, and those in which they are implicitly hidden. Subjecting a selective subset of these images to visual semiotic analysis, we identify two semiological myths of the smart home. Images with visible smart home technologies express a mythology of the smart home as a space of familiarity where ‘belongingness’ is extended beyond humans to include smart objects. Conversely, images in which smart technologies are implicitly hidden signify the home to be a site that is unfamiliar, rendered extra-ordinary through the luxury of the efficient automation of the social reproduction of home. We argue that these seemingly oppositional semiotic narratives actually work in concert to secure social acceptance of the smart home, which ultimately informs consumer expectations of design practitioners amongst a cross-section of disciplines.

The (Smart) Home And Architectural Media

While the concept of home is culturally contingent (Rykwert, 1991), and variously defined across disciplines, it is commonly understood as aligned with the private sphere and withdrawal from public life, the prying eyes of the state, and the presence of non-intimate others (Blunt and Dowling, 2022; Chambers, 2020). It is both a material and imagined site of lived experience and sociality associated with built dwellings that Blunt and Dowling (2022: 92) refer to as the ‘house-as-home’. These dwellings are spaces in which ‘basic forms of social relations’ – those of family, intimacy, and care – ‘are constituted and reproduced’ through acts and practices of social reproduction; that is, ‘life sustaining activities’ that make a house-as-home what it is (Rodríguez-Rocha, 2021: 2; Rykwert, 1991; Saunders and Williams, 1988: 82). In Western ontologies, the house-as-home has been understood as imbued with a number of longstanding and overlapping meanings, including those of physical shelter, security/privacy/haven, comfort/hearth, belongingness, and familiarity (Blunt and Dowling, 2022; Chambers, 2020; Mallett, 2004).

These meanings of house-as-home are continuously being shaped and negotiated by forces that include information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Kennedy et al., 2020). Looking at the early years of the rollout of television in the 1950s, Spigel (1992) writes that TV changed the meaning of home from that of a purely private sphere segregated from public life to a theatre/exhibition space that brought the public world outside into the intimate spaces of the domestic realm. While the integration of ICTs into homes is accordingly nothing new, their proliferation within domestic spaces has intensified with the relatively recent emergence of the smart home. This is a domicile seeded by an array of digitally networked devices and appliances that, when controlled over digital networks via digital interfaces, are seen to enhance residents’ ‘comfort, convenience, security and entertainment’ (Aldrich, 2003: 17) – via for example intelligent agents embedded within devices facilitating hands-free, voice-based commands to play music, add an appointment to a cloud-based calendar, and turn house lights on and off. This suffusion of networked technology in the home has resulted in domestic spaces taking on new functions, including as command-and-control centres (Kennedy et al., 2020), and as surveillant assemblages that collect and transmit vast quantities of information about their residents (Maalsen and Sadowski, 2019). These new functions in turn underwrite evolving meanings of home.

Visual media have played a key role in shaping these shifting functions and meanings of home. In addition to demonstration homes, television, and large-scale outdoor advertisements (Aldrich, 2003; Chambers, 2016), magazines and periodicals have been amongst the most significant media through which these nascent meanings of house-as-home have been shaped in public discoursess. Spigel (1992), for instance, identifies that magazines served as a key venue for a range of discursive meanings to become attached to televisions as they entered the postwar home, including contradictory narratives of televisions as a facilitator of both domestic family unity (gathering around a TV set) and of familial fragmentation (family members separating from each other to watch different programs on different TV sets dispersed throughout the home). These discourses were inherently visual, articulated through print advertisements and photospreads showing different familial arrangements vis-à-vis television sets within 1950s and 1960s homes. In Spigel’s analysis, she espouses a theory of media as ‘a ground for cultural debate’ rather than a ‘propaganda’ channel or a set of industries (p. 8). This framework underwrites her accounting of how diverse and even oppositional meanings become attached to both technologies (in her case, TV) and the domestic spaces in which they are deployed.

In this article, we mobilize this framing of media as a site for producing and contesting cultural meaning as a basis for interrogating whether and how visual representations of smart homes may be informing shifts in long-held Western meanings of the house-as-home. We specifically engage with images of smart home spaces (interiors and exteriors) in architectural trade publications, which play a vital role in introducing and establishing the concept of the smart home in public imaginaries. They do so by circulating the smart home and its idealized material instantiations amongst a diverse range of audiences, including home dwellers (residents), architecture professionals and aficionados, marketers, designers, and influencers. As residential dwellings are a central concern of architecture, this makes architectural media a choice venue for the publication of smart home visual content. Architectural publications are also sites of ‘experimentation that pre-empt “real-world” productions’ of house-as-home (Parnell and Sawyer, 2021: 43). This ultimately informs shifts in the direction of the design, functionality, and inhabitation of smart home spaces in the real world, making visual representations of smart homes of interest to practitioners – including architects, interior designers, and technology designers – who are then tasked with bringing these shifting ideals to life for consumers.

Indeed, architectural media have been identified as sites through which different meanings of the home are cultivated, disseminated, and internalized. A prominent axis of these investigations has been the relationship between visual representations of residential dwellings and the attachment of gendered meanings to home spaces. For instance, in the 1950s and 60s, the featuring of open-concept floorplans in both Finnish (Sanaksenaho, 2020) and Australian (Lloyd and Johnson, 2004) architectural magazines eased the strict separation of women’s and men’s domestic spaces, paralleling and reinforcing the equalization of domestic gender roles. Elsewhere, mid-century American men’s magazines established the bachelor pad as a site of masculinist freedom to engage in individualistic and hedonistic consumption (Osgerby, 2005). In their textual and image content analysis of smart home-centric material published across a number of digital technology magazines and online publications, Strengers and Nicholls (2018) found that, like bachelor pads, smart homes also extend promises of enhanced leisure for men – promises which coalesce around ‘lifestyle expectations’ (p. 72) of ‘aesthetic pleasure’ (p. 70) and ‘reduced labour’ (p. 72).

Yet, beyond Strengers and Nicholls’ study, little scholarly attention has been paid to visual representations of smart homes. In this article, we build on the pioneering work of Strengers and Nicholls and earlier Spigel (1992) in two ways. First, we shift the focus away from the meanings of ICTs in the home to the meanings of the smart technology-seeded home spaces themselves. And second, we take a step back from interrogating what smart homes could be or are desired to be like in a proximate future (Strengers and Nicholls, 2018) to examining the meanings of actually-existing smart homes as they are represented in the here-and-now. We do so via a methodology that moves beyond standalone content analysis, taking a semiotic rather than discursive approach to the analysis of smart home imagery.

Methodology

Image data

To investigate visual representations of smart homes, we assembled a corpus of images sourced form a selection of six architectural publications available online: the magazines ICON,¹ Canadian Architect,² Control4,³ Home & Design,⁴ Dwell,⁵ and the ArchDaily website.⁶ These resources are largely North American, Anglophone media, reflecting Western design aesthetics, narratives, and ideals of smart homes. These publications were chosen because (i) they publish visual architectural content, including representations of smart homes; (ii) do so digitally; and (iii) are publicly accessible online without a paywall, meaning they are intended for mass consumption. Furthermore, these media are targeted at different audiences, including professional architects (Canadian Architect), lay architecture and interior design afficionados (Dwell), and prospective consumers of smart home technologies (Control4). As such, these sources constitute a robust cross-section of flavors of visual representations of smart homes, and support the analytic identification of representational trends (content analysis) and meanings of home (semiotic analysis) across these visual materials. We considered all images published across these six outlets between 2018–2020, a three-year window that parallels the temporality of both increased scholarly attention on the smart home, and the accelerated adoption of the smart home in the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic (Maalsen and Dowling, 2020). Three criteria guided the inclusion of images published within this three-year window into our data corpus:

(1) images had to appear to be photorealistic (looked like live-capture photographs), to the exclusion of architectural renderings, drawings, sketches, blueprints, and fully computer-generated images;

(2) images were designated as being of smart homes by combinations of the keywords ‘smart’ and ‘home/s’ appearing in their image metadata (tags), captions, and/or titles of features/photospreads; and

(3) images had to be wide lens angle photographs of expansive portions of smart home interiors or exteriors (e.g. an entire room or an entire wall), to the exclusion of images zoomed into singular objects or design flourishes (e.g. a close-up of a smart thermostat).

Based on these criteria, a total of 321 images were collected. We then subjected the images in this corpus to content analysis followed by semiotic analysis.

Content analysis

Visual content analysis is an observational, descriptive method used to identify what kinds of phenomena a given visual medium represents (Rose, 2016) – in our study, the objects, carbon-based life forms, and interiors/exteriors of the smart homes included in all images in our data corpus. This method supports an accounting of frequencies, relationships, and variations in what is depicted across a set of media. Visual content analysis was carried out using a coding-based approach within NVivo, a qualitative coding and analysis software that facilitates assigning text-based codes (akin to labels) to images and the subsequent analysis of these codes (frequency, co-occurrence of codes, etc.). A coding structure was developed in advance of content analysis, and this structure was then used to code each image according to these pre-set categories. Images were coded to five categories of content:

(1) where visible, types of digital/smart devices and technologies (objects such as digital screens, interactive touch panels, smart speakers, etc.), and whether they appeared in the background or foreground;

(2) genre of the space (home interior and/or exterior; and the kind of space was captured in the image, e.g., living room, kitchen, etc.);

(3) signs of inhabitation (presence of people and/or pets, plants requiring watering);

(4) other personal objects (décor, artworks, textiles, etc.); and

(5) design aesthetics, including physical materials; color palettes; architectural forms/geometries; and modernist and minimalist design styles (the two dominant styles of contemporary homes).

Modernist and minimalist design are both concerned with form (angular lines in modernism; angular and curved lines in minimalism), and feature large windows and neutral color palettes. A distinguishing feature of minimalist as compared to modernist design is that it eschews all elements that do not serve a functional purpose, rejecting ornamentation and giving rise to sparsely furnished interiors (Nia and Rahbarianyazd, 2020). Differentiation between modernist and minimalist aesthetics was important towards informing our subsequent analysis of how smart home images are visually producing meanings of home. For instance, in modernist interiors, bare white walls invite personalization through the addition of vibrant accents (Jacobs and Cairns, 2008), whereas the depersonalized sparseness of minimalist interiors reflects an effort at enacting the home as a refuge – an uncluttered sanctuary ‘away from [the crowdedness] of city life’ (Cheon and Su, 2018: 1).

Semiotic analysis

Following content analysis, we selected a subset of 12 images (Table 1) that we identified as being representative of the larger image corpus, inclusive of the most frequently encountered elements and aesthetics identified in our content analysis. We subjected this subset to visual semiotic analysis to examine how the image elements we identified functioned together as signifiers of house-as-home, potentially giving rise to nascent semiotic myths – or narratives – of home. Semiotics is the study of signs; visual semiotic analysis is concerned with identifying elements (signifiers) within visual artifacts that have been imbued with meaning, and subsequently interpreting the ways in which these signs signify wider social meanings (that which is signified) in relation to other elements within an image, as well as in relation to other images (Bartram, 2016). Signs may be iconic (meaning is based on similarity of physical appearance between signifier and signified); indexical (cause-and-effect relationship between a sign and its meaning); and/or symbolic (arbitrary but conventionalized relationship between signifier and signified, with the meaning of the sign learned culturally; Rose, 2016).

Table 1.

Details of images selected for semiotic analysis.

Selected images in which smart home technologies were visible
Image	Description
1	Living room anchored by a large leather sectional. Icons overlayed on top of the image identify the smart technologies embedded in the space: smart lighting, a smart TV, control panels, and smart blinds.
2	Kitchen with an L-shaped island, one section of which is an interactive screen running the length of the countertop. Two women (one chopping vegetables, one seated) are looking at the screen displaying cooking instructions and recipes.
3	Male reclined in a relaxed position on a couch using a laptop.
4	Living room with traditional furniture assembled around an electric hearth, with a smart TV mounted above it.
5	A man holding a toddler in his arms approaching a smart elevator in a kitchen. Toys placed atop a slightly bunched-up rug on the kitchen floor.
6	Heterosexual couple seated on a comfortable-looking couch with large throw pillows. Shot from behind, the couple is holding hands and looking at a smart TV.
Selected images in which smart home technologies were implicitly hidden
Image	Description
7	A modern sparsely-furnished living room. Large floor-to-ceiling windows open onto landscaped exterior. Two pieces of sculpture (one indoors, one outside) are visible. Space is otherwise devoid of accents or personal items.
8	Open-concept kitchen and dining room with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling finishes, large windows opening onto the exterior. All appliances (refrigerator, stovetop, ovens, etc.) are integrated into the kitchen island and wall.
9	Open-concept living room anchored by a large sectional and electric fireplace. Male standing in the far background. Only decorative accent in an otherwise all-white space is an ochre-coloured decorative plate. Floor-to-ceiling windows comprise exterior wall.
10	Very minimalist kitchen with natural wood and stone finishes. White colour palette. With the exception of ovens, all appliances are integrated into the finishes and cabinetry/island.
11	Corner of a living room featuring large windows. Man seated reading a book on a bench running the length of one of the windows. Two dogs lying down on the floor. A plant and armchair are the only other items visible.
12	Rectangular bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows along two orthogonal edges. Wood-panelled interior walls and ceiling. Heterosexual couple sits at a table drinking wine, looking at the sun setting behind the hills outside.

Signification occurs through both denotation, in which the meanings of signs are self-contained (literal meaning of a signifier); and connotation, wherein signification connects signs to a wider range of cultural conventions and ideologies that inform interpretations of their meanings. Together, denotations and connotations give rise to narratives of meaning, or ‘myths’: semiological systems in which visual artefacts may be read as a ‘sum of signs’ telling a story that is immediately obvious (i.e. not hidden or obfuscated) and unfalsifiable, yet also unverifiable (Barthes, 1982: 9). In this sense, standing Western cultural ideas of home as a private, secure hearth and haven of familiarity and belonging constitute a taken-for-granted cultural mythology of home, despite instances that belie this narrative (such as the reality that home is too often a site of violence rather than safety; Duncan and Lambert, 2004). In this study, we mobilize a holistic Barthesian (1982) semiotic approach that involves reading the image as a whole to understand how signs (image elements identified through content analysis) work in concert to construct and sustain narratives of home.

In visual semiotics, all images are understood to derive their meaning relative to other images (Rose, 2016). Accordingly, in addition to the subset of 12 images subjected to semiotic analysis, we also analyzed a representative image of a conventional non-smart home using both content and semiotic analysis as described above. Our analysis of this image – which we refer to as a ‘typical’ and/or ‘non-smart’ home – constitutes a touchstone reference to inform our interpretation of how smart home images semiotically narrate meanings of the house-as-home. This image was selected because it appeared on the first page of a Google image search result for the phrase ‘typical home’. This image struck us as immediately recognizable of our expectations of what a ‘typical’ home looks like, in that we both found it broadly representative of contemporary interiors of residential spaces featured in online and print architectural and interior design media (websites and magazines). It was not titled, captioned, or tagged as being of a smart home, nor featured as part of photo essays of smart living spaces. There was also no visible trace of any smart technology (digital and/or connected objects, screens, or other devices) in the image. Importantly, in describing images of a ‘typical’ home as ‘non-smart’, we are not characterizing it as devoid of digital technologies, but rather designating that the image is not tagged, captioned, or titled as being of a smart home. Because we found the image so compellingly familiar as being of a ‘typical’ contemporary residential interior, we did not look beyond this image for additional images of ‘non-smart’ homes.

Due to copyright restrictions, images analyzed in this study cannot be reproduced here. Instead, our discussion is supported by illustrative, royalty-free images of architectural spaces likewise designated as being of smart homes that appeared in the results chain for searches of ‘smart home’ on image-sharing websites hosting free-to-use visuals. These illustrative images very closely mirror the contents and design aesthetics of the image subset selected for semiotic analysis. We begin our analytic discussion with an engagement of a representative image of what we term a ‘typical, non-smart home’, in relation to which we advance our analytic claims about visual smart home representations.

The Contents And Semiotics Of A ‘Typical’ Home Image

An example of a typical, ‘non-smart’ home image is shown in Figure 1. This image is nearly identical in contents and aesthetics to the ‘typical’ home image that we actually analyzed for this study, with the exception that the image reproduced here (Figure 1) includes the presence of a digital tablet, whereas the image we analyzed did not include any visible trace of digital devices. Six things are notable about the contents of this representative image, all of which express a semiotic mythology of conventionally-held meanings of home.

Figure 1.

Representative image of a typical contemporary Western home interior.

First, contrasting against the bare white walls of the living space is the warm color palette of the furnishings and décor items (e.g. pastel-pink magazine holder, ochre pillow shams, and warm brown tones of the wood floors and animal skin rug). The warm colors of these objects indexically connote a meaning of home as hearth (a source of warmth), a ‘refuge or a sanctuary’ from a cold, ‘heartless world’ outside (Walters, 2004: 241). Second, the amply stuffed chaise-lounge, plush pillows, and rolled-up blankets indexically denote the meaning of home as a space of comfort for its inhabitants. Third, a family pet (dog) requiring human attention and care lying on the living room floor alongside a houseplant needing regular watering denotes this to be a home that is actually inhabited, as does the skewed positioning of the rightmost pillow and bunched-up animal skin rug, both of which indicate recent use. These are signs that symbolically signify the meaning of house-as-home as a private haven, ‘our [personal] place’ (Walters, 2004: 241) where we have the latitude to be imperfect, versus a space in which residents perform the perfection of an impeccably arranged home. Fourth, additional signs of personalization such as the picture frames on the wall – presumedly encasing images of personal significance – symbolically signify a typical home to be a space of personal familiarity, a place ‘where we belong naturally, and where, by definition, others do not’. Fifth, while it only captures a corner of a living room, Figure 1 shows an exhaustion of the available space by personally selected, idiosyncratic furnishings, décor, accents, and other objects. And sixth, the residential living space represented in Figure 1 features straight-line shapes, including walls that meet at 90-degree angles to each other, and a large rectangular window, both signatures of modernist design aesthetics.

In the sections that follow, we identify how the elements and design aesthetics of visual representations of smart homes symbolically connect to and/or diverge from this semiotic mythology of a typical contemporary home as a familiar, comfortable and highly personal(ized) hearth and haven. First, however, we identify trends and patterns in the contents of our selected sample of 321 smart home images.

What’s in a smart home image?

The results of our content analysis of our image corpus are summarized in Table 2. As this table shows, two key modalities of images were identified during coding analysis: those in which smart home technologies were highly visible (37% of all images; e.g. Figure 2), often placed in the image foreground; and those in which smart devices/appliances were not visible (the majority - 63% - of all images; e.g. Figure 3). This latter category of visuals still counted as images of smart homes because they satisfied the three criteria for image inclusion in the data corpus (see the image data section above). Accordingly, we considered these images as those in which smart home technologies are present, but implicitly hidden – actively deployed, but operating out of view (for instance, encased behind walls or within fixtures, cabinetry, etc.).

Table 2.

Summary of coded content frequences across two identified modalities of smart home images: those in which smart technologies were visible, and those in which they were implicitly hidden.

	Images in which smart technologies were visible (n = 119; 37%)	Images in which smart technologies were hidden (n = 202; 63%)
Room/space pictured	n images (within-mode %)
Living room	42 (35.29%)	62 (30.69%)
Kitchen	33 (27.73%)	22 (10.89%)
Game room/smart theatre	12 (10.08%)	9 (4.46%)
Dining room	10 (8.4%)	20 (9.9%)
Bedroom	8 (6.72%)	24 (11.88%)
Hallway/corridor	5 (4.2%)	24 (11.88%)
Other (e.g., garage, house exterior)	9 (7.56%)	41 (20.3%)
Smart technologies visible (not mutually exclusive)	n images (within-mode %)	N/A
Lighting	15 (12.6%)	–
Large format display (e.g., smart TV)	22 (18.49%)	–
Free-standing control panels	15 (12.6%)	–
Mounted control panels	5 (4.2%)	–
Appliances (fridges, toasters, etc.)	15 (12.6%)	–
Privacy (e.g. smart blinds)	17 (14.29%)	–
Tablets	10 (8.4%)	–
Smartphones	3 (2.52%)	–
Smart speakers	3 (2.52%)	–
Smart thermostats	4 (3.36%)	–
Surveillance devices (e.g. cameras)	2 (1.68%)	–
Laptops	1	–
	1	–
Smart elevators	3 (2.52%)	–
Solar panels	3 (2.52%)	–
Technology placement (not mutually exclusive)	n images (within-mode %)	N/A
Foreground	57 (47.9%)	–
Background	62 (52.1%)	–
Foreground & background	38 (31.93%)	–
Presence of other elements (not mutually exclusive)	n images (within-mode %)	n images (within-mode %)
Humans	17 (14.29%)	22 (10.89%)
Pets	5 (4.2%)	6 (3%)
Indoor plants	31 (26.05%)	47 (23.27%)
Personal items/objects	19 (15.97%)	13 (6.44%)
Architectural/design style	n images (within-mode %)	n images (within-mode %)
Modernist	91 (76.47%)	51 (25.25%)
Minimalist	28 (23.53%)	151 (74.75%)
Dominant geometric forms	n images (within-mode %)	n images (within-mode %)
Angular	22 (18.49%)	41 (20.3%)
Straight	77 (64.71%)	119 (58.91%)
Round	10 (8.4%)	18 (8.91%)
Curved	10 (8.4%)	24 (11.88%)
Colour palette
Dark neutral tones	43 (36.13%)	107 (52.97)
Light neutral tones	76 (63.87%)	95 (47.03)

Figure 2.

Representative examples of smart home images in which smart technologies such as smart panels (a) and smart TVs (b) are visible.

Figure 3.

Representative example of a smart home image in which technologies are implicitly hidden.

The most frequently captured spaces across all images were living rooms, and both humans and pets were largely absent from both modalities of images, with humans slightly more present in images with visible technology, whereas pets were slightly more visible in images where technologies were hidden. Both image modalities were also largely devoid of personal items, although these elements were pronouncedly less visible in images in which smart technologies were hidden from view. Aside from these similarities, images in which smart home technologies were visible versus hidden were markedly different from each other. Most notably, images in which smart technologies were visible expressed modernist design features similar to those of a representative image of a ‘typical’, ‘non-smart’ home (Figure 1), inclusive of characteristics such as flat roofs, large windows, and ornamentation. The interiors of these spaces were densely furnished (exhausting the available space) and decorated with elements such as textiles. The predominant color palette of these interiors consisted of light neutral tones. In contrast, smart homes in which digital technologies were hidden from view expressed a minimalist design aesthetic. They were characterized by the bare minimum of embellishments; simple geometric shapes, including curved lines; exposed construction materials and finishes; a skew towards dark neutral color palettes; minimal furnishings; and sparseness (non-exhaustion of available space). In the section that follows, we report on the semiotics of these two modalities of images, focussing on the narratives of ‘house-as-home’ that they express.

The Visual Semiotics Of Smart Home Images

Based on a systematic semiotic analysis of a subset of 12 images – six in which technologies are both visible, and six in which smart devices were implicitly hidden (Table 2) – we found these images semiotically invoked visual tropes of a ‘typical’ (‘non-smart’) home while also opposing them, respectively. Images in which digital objects were visible mobilized the visual semiotics of a typical, ‘non-smart’ home to signify smart living spaces as intimately familiar places of belongingness for people (residents) and also smart objects. Conversely, selected images in which smart objects were implicitly hidden signified meanings of home that diverged from that of a ‘typical’ home. Rather than reproducing established Western narratives of home, images in this latter category signified a mythology of house-as-home as an as-yet unfamiliar spatiality in which the social reproduction of home is automated through backgrounded smart technologies.

Familiar spaces of belonging for people and smart objects

Semiotically analyzing the six images of smart homes in which participating technologies were visible, we read these images as signifying house-as-home in three key ways. First, they mirrored the contents and aesthetics of a typical, non-smart home. Residential interiors in these images looked very much like those of a contemporary ‘typical’ home, but with the addition of strategically placed ‘smart’ devices and appliances visible within the image frame. Second, similar to the image of a ‘typical’ home, these smart home images expressed a modernist design aesthetic (e.g. straight-line structural elements, light neutral color palettes. And, third, their interiors were similarly densely populated with comfortable furniture and the presence of imperfectly placed personal objects (e.g. children’s toys strewn on the floor; haphazardly stacked books), and a plethora of decorative objects (e.g. artwork, vases).

By mobilizing the visual semiotic mythologies of ‘typical’ Western interiors, these images (re)expressed the meanings of the house-as-home as a site of security/privacy, comfort/hearth, haven/shelter, and importantly, belongingness and familiarity. The visible presence of iconic signs of smartness in these already-familiar spaces – smart lighting, smart sockets, mounted touch panels, smart thermostats, etc. – within a recognizable visual tableau of a ‘typical’ home signifies that the inhabitants of the spaces in the images are intimately acquainted with these objects and with their operationalization, or what we term familiarity-with-control over smart objects. These smart objects in turn indexically connote these domestic spaces to be themselves controllable via the visible technologies, which we refer to as control-of-familiarity to designate how smart devices are represented as signifying the extension of control over familiar spaces of the home. This myth of the smart home as a simultaneous familiarity-with-control and control-of-familiarity is most strongly signified in two ways. The first is through images which depict smart control ‘in action’, most commonly through semi-transparent overlays of signs such as the wifi symbol () or a cloud icon () superimposed over a photorealistic image of a smart home interior or exterior. Images of this variety show smart home technology functionalities dissolving into the ether of the home, such that smart functions do not disrupt established mythologies of the home. The second is through images that show people directly interacting with smart devices and interfaces, signifying these kinds of activities to be part and parcel of the familiar rhythms of routine household activities.

Through this narrative of familiarity with spaces and with novel digital devices, these images connote meanings of the home as a site of immutable belonging for both humans and also smart devices. In other words, these images connote smart living spaces to be those in which new smart home devices themselves do not appear out of place, but rather constitute an inescapable and indispensable part of the fabric of the recognizable visual textures and imaginaries of a ‘typical’ home space. In our reading, the semiotic myth of the smart home signified by images of smart homes in which technologies are visible is one of the smart home as familiar: a space that is immediately recognizable in all semiological senses as ‘home’ in its established sense in Western ontologies of home as hearth, haven, etc. in which both humans and now more recently non-human smart objects always-already belong.

The exceptional luxury of automated social reproduction

The visual semiotics of smart home images in which constituent technologies are implicitly hidden stand in direct contrast to the semiotics of images with visible smart technologies. Rather than mobilizing signifiers that ‘are already formed by the signs of the [visual] language’ of a typical home (Barthes, 1982: 102), we read these images as signifying in opposition to the conventionally accepted mythology of house-as-home. The most notable of these oppositions are the contrasting aesthetics of these images compared to the image of a typical, ‘non-smart’ home: dark neutral tones vs light neutral color palettes, the inclusion of curved and rounded forms vs straight lines and angles, and minimalism over modernism. Semiotically, we contend that the six selected images with implicitly hidden smart technologies also signify in contrast to the visual semiotics of the ‘typical’ home through the preponderance of voids: absences of people and pets; lack of nearly all traces of personalization (e.g. no ornamentation); and emptiness marked by the sparsity of material objects within interiors. In contrast to the signs of personalization and spatial exhaustion of typical and smart home images with visible technologies, the aesthetics, depopulation, depersonalization, and sparseness of images with implicitly hidden technologies are all signs that symbolically signify smart homes to be inherently unlike ‘typical’, ‘non-smart’ homes.

The pristine quality of the smart home environments captured in this subset of images – semiotically expressed through the minimalism of their interiors – connotes smart homes to be dwellings in which smart devices always-already automate and allow for the remote control of quotidian tasks of the labor of social reproduction, and which enable the home to be reproduced in the course of everyday life. Examples of the subsumption of acts of social reproduction to digital automation and remote control include manually adjusting ambient room temperatures automated by smart thermostats; physically vacuuming and sweeping floors taken over by self-deploying robots; and the crafting of shopping lists supplanted by smart fridges automatically reordering grocery items when they sense they are running low. In these images, the smart home is one in which the absences of nonessential items (furnishings, décor) symbolically connote the messiness and mundanity of everyday life – comprised of both physical clutter and the drudgery of domestic labor – to be pre-emptively resolved for a smart home’s inhabitants by the smart technologies themselves, operating seamlessly and invisibly in the background. This connotes an ‘intangible luxury’ vested not in smart objects themselves (which are invisible), but rather in the implied experience of the highly personalized services coordinated by these technologies (Ramadan, 2019).

This signification of luxury is buttressed by the cool neutral color palettes of this subset of images, which indexically connote the smart home to be not a warm hearth, but rather a site of cool (as in precise) efficiency delivered by smart devices that take over the onus of coordinating the functioning of the home. The semiotic mythology of the image smart home with hidden technologies, we contend, is thus one of the house-as-home as a site of exceptional, intangible luxury experienced as the cool, efficient automation of the social reproduction of home. This is a mythology of the promise of smart home futures – namely, that of reduced domestic workloads (Strengers and Nicholls, 2018) – being delivered on, realized in the materiality of a smart home modality that is represented as actually-existing in the here and now.

Securing The Smart Home Concept

These two semiotic myths of the smart home appear oppositional, signifying the smart home as, on one hand, constituting a familiar place of belonging for both humans and smart objects alike and, on the other hand, comprising an exceptional space wherein residents are freed from the familiarities of quotidian social reproduction. Yet we contend that despite their apparent incongruence, both of these visual narratives function to secure social and consumer buy-in for the concept of the smart home in two distinct but equally important ways.

By semiotically deploying signs of a ‘typical’ home and mythologizing the smart home as immediately familiar, images in which smart home technologies are visible project the smart home as socially acceptable by securing trust for the concept of the smart home. ‘Trust’ in this sense involves cultivating a sense of control in a domestic environment rendered unpredictable (and thus unfamiliar) through the introduction of new kinds of devices, appliances, and practices. This makes viewing audiences ‘confident that’ their adoption of and experimentation and interaction with smart objects is ‘sufficiently cushioned by the familiarity of’ the smart home as still being recognizable as a ‘typical’ house-as-home in the established sense of a haven, hearth, and belongingnesss (Pink et al., 2018: 3). This building of trust through the semiotics of familiarity is crucial for securing broad social as well as individual consumer acceptance of smart homes technologies by countering any distrust that prospective smart home residents may have in smart home technologies owing to, for instance, their being surveillant apparatuses. These images’ effectieness in securing trust in and for the smart home underwrites the unfalsifiability of the myth of the smart home as a house-as-home where not only humans but also smart devices intrinsically belong.

Conversely, images in which smart objects are implicitly hidden secure buy-in for the smart home by promulgating it as an unquestionably desirable and thereby aspirational product that consumers will work to inhabit by exercising their spending power, despite the exceptional luxury which renders the concept of the smart home aspirational, out-of-reach for lower-income households. The mythology of the smart home as an aspirational luxury is highly contingent on these images’ semiotic opposition to the familiarity of images in which smart technologies are highly visible. Rather than a domestic space that middle-class Western consumers see themselves as already living in, the unfamiliarity of the smart home portrayed in these images is one not yet inhabited by most, but one which is nevertheless attainable over the long term through the incremental adoption of trustworthy smart home devices marketed as democratizing the intangible luxury of smartness, freeing residents from the drudgery of social reproduction, one smart device at a time.

The findings of our study establish the vital role of visual media in circulating not only future visions of the smart home, but also in giving rise to meanings of actually-existing smart homes as they materialize in the present. We argue that, by engendering dual affects of trust in and aspiration for the smart home, the visual semiotics of smart home images functionally secure it as ‘natural’ – that is, ‘unquestionable, inevitable, and even desirable’ (Besky and Blanchette, 2018). Understanding how images of smart homes both leverage and remake meanings of home are of relevance to disciplines including media studies, communication, architecture, and engineering because these idealized visions of home and what it means to inhabit the house-as-home become internalized as expectations of smart home spaces and of smart home technologies – expectations that designers and practitioners across these and other fields are then tasked with delivering to consumers.

Footnotes

Data Sharing Statement

Research data not shared.

ORCID iD

Agnieszka Leszczynski

Notes

Biographical Notes

SARA SADATI FAR is a building systems designer based at Western University, London, ON, Canada. She holds a Bachelors degree in Architectural Engineering and a Masters in Geography.

Address: Western University SSC 2322, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON N6A 5C2, Canada. [ email: ssadati3@uwo.ca]

AGNIESZKA LESZCZYNSKI is an Associate Professor based at Western University, London, ON, Canada, pursuing scholarship in digital geographies and cities.

Address: Western University SSC 2322, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON N6A 5C2, Canada.

[ email: agnieszka.leszczynski@uwo.ca]

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