Stacey Higginbotham posts on the smart home is dead.
The smart home is dead. I'm not sure exactly when the time of death should have been called, but it happened at some point between Google trying to rebrand the smart home as "the helpful home" and the publication of this article, which expresses dismay that at five years of age, Amazon's Alexa offers little more than a new way of interacting with things, without deep functionality or truly new use cases.
This week in New York, at an IoT Consortium event, I listened to executives of dozens of companies associated with the smart home talk around its death but never address the fact directly. Instead, they talked about a lack of compelling use cases, how to move beyond a device-specific mindset, and the ways they are trying to handle consumer demand for interoperability in the smart home without actually providing such interoperability.
If the smart home is dead will the smart building face the same fate? Construction of homes and buildings has not changed to accommodate IOT. The approach has been to bolt on the IOT things. Plug it in or battery operated. Join your home wifi network and now it is on the Internet. My friend Dennis and I have been slow to adopt IOT things and we have chosen the same approach of home network security with enterprise firewall/router running PFsense on Netgate hardware with Unifi APs with a home network and IOT network segmentation. Some IOT devices to be functional need to be on the home network. Many others can exist on the IOT network. With this network configuration we can monitor devices.
When we got together to chat a couple of weeks ago, Dennis told the story of how he found what look like a rogue device on his network that was running a server and he was trying to figure out what the heck it was as everything was secure up to that point. Then he pointed to my Joule sous vide and said that was the culprit he had as well. The Joule device runs a server with a china chipset that looks really suspicious. After that he moved it IOT network. I had already done that. Cameras, LG appliances, Ring Cameras and many others are pushed to IOT SSID and that network is monitored and managed by PFsense.
If this sounds hard. It is. Dennis and I have exchanged many e-mails and have had conversations on how to have a better home network.
One approach I have been studying for a long time and finally been making some good progress is on the use of Christopher Alexander’s Patterns ideas and Wholeness. Unfortunately reading Christopher’s books are not the easiest. One paper that help me understand the concept of Centers and Wholeness is this paper by Bin Jiang on “A Complex-Network Perspective on Alexander’s Wholeness. These ideas applied the smart home/building make so much sense.
Abstract
The wholeness, conceived and developed by Christopher Alexander, is what exists to some degree or other in space and matter, and can be described by precise mathematical language. However, it remains somehow mysterious and elusive, and therefore hard to grasp. This paper develops a complex network perspective on the wholeness to better understand the nature of order or beauty for sustainable design. I bring together a set of complexity-science subjects such as complex networks, fractal geometry, and in particular underlying scaling hierarchy derived by head/tail breaks – a classification scheme and a visualization tool for data with a heavy-tailed distribution, in order to make Alexander’s profound thoughts more accessible to design practitioners and complexity-science researchers. Through several case studies (some of which Alexander studied), I demonstrate that the complex-network perspective helps reduce the mystery of wholeness and brings new insights to Alexander’s thoughts on the concept of wholeness or objective beauty that exists in fine and deep structure. The complex-network perspective enables us to see things in their wholeness, and to better understand how the kind of structural beauty emerges from local actions guided by the 15 fundamental properties, and by differentiation and adaptation processes. The wholeness goes beyond current complex network theory towards design or creation of living structures.
Keywords: Theory of centers, living geometry, Christopher Alexander, head/tail breaks, and beauty