Sound of a Smart Home

Sound of a Smart Home is a design exploration to reflect on how we currently use and experience connected products in our home environments. While the Internet of Things, as a global mesh of data gathered, computed, and communicated by smart objects, has brought us convenience, the way of communicating the state of the smart home now heavily leans on quantified information displays. An immediate demand and delivery relationship with smart objects exists, but touches us only in very utilitarian ways. Yet, the question remains: how to create sustainable and harmonized experiences with everyday smart objects?

Sound of a Smart Home is a slow and unaware object that provides a summary of the activity of all connected products within a smart home in the form of a unique 20-second soundscape played every hour. This design collects data that is exchanged between connected things for an hour and then transforms it into a soundscape of ambient sounds that are mapped to specific data streams in the house and subtle changes that happen to them over time. By using sound as a medium instead of visually quantified information, it proposes an alternative, more intuitive way to experience your smart home as a whole and as an evolving ecosystem.

Ultimately, the project explores how slowing down the experience of smart home data through intersections might support reflections on the technology itself and on the everyday practices it is part of. This experience aims at supporting a longer-lasting relationship and engagement with everyday connected objects.

---

Final Bachelors Project @ Industrial Design, TU/e (2018)