Smart Homes in Use, Practical Gaps and Tensions: Metadata and Documentation, 2022-2025

In this factsheet, we explore the realities of smart home technologies in use by examining the practical gaps and tensions that arise when smart systems are introduced into everyday domestic life. By highlighting seven recurring contradictions, including accessibility, professional constraints, privacy, surveillance, routine disruption, electronic waste, and increased consumption, it shows how promises of comfort, efficiency, convenience and sustainability are often reshaped in practice. The factsheet offers an accessible overview of the unintended consequences and everyday realities involved in putting smart home ambitions into operation.

This Fact Sheet is part of the SMARTUP Project: Smart(ening up the modern) home – Redesigning power dynamics through domestic space digitalisation. The UK consortium for this CHANSE project is co-funded between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), grant number ES/X005038/1.

SMARTUP is supported by Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR), Germany; Academy of Finland, Finland; UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK; Narodowe Centrum Nauki, Poland under CHANSE ERA-NET Co-fund programme, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under Grant Agreement no 101004509.