Lea Simpson

Lea Simpson
High Maintenance Homes
the ups and downs of your connected everything

GET EMOTIONAL
THE TWO THINGS HOLDING US BACK
THREE THINGS TAKING US FORWARD
GET EMOTIONAL AGAIN
14/11/2014 2

DEPICTIONS OF THE CONNECTED HOME
Dystopian
Utopian dystopia – even when it’s good, it’s really, really bad
14/11/2014 6

I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are
flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I
never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my
house has a virus again.
Image via Wired
14/11/2014 7

Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it.
Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is
fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It
takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to
Facebook. No big deal. @mat for Wired UK
Image via Wired
14/11/2014 8

Fun experiment, but do we really want to live like this?
14/11/2014 9

"We’re a little bit of a hammer looking for a nail right now," Chris Quatrochi, Whirlpool's
global director of user experience and connectivity
14/11/2014 10

WHAT ABOUT THE BIG NAMES?
ORAL B
Bluetoothbrush! The Oral-B SmartSeries electric toothbrush, talks to your phone via
Bluetooth 4.0 and shows a countdown on your phone.

Dear Connected Home, why so sh*t all the time?
Image via @0100

GET EMOTIONAL
GET EMOTIONAL AGAIN
14/11/2014 13

SETTING THE SCENE
A SMART HOUSE DIVIDED
The House of Babel

A SMART HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND
• Some speak to your router over Wi-Fi
• Others speak to your tablet over Bluetooth
• Kwikset, Yale and Schlage make smart deadbolts that relay information
using Z-Wave
• Philips Hue bulbs are fluent in ZigBee
• There's Insteon's network
• Clear Connect protocol spoken by Lutron products
• And countless other proprietary languages to keep track of

SmartThings’s mission is to sit at the center of this open physical graph ecosystem.
Supports: Ethernet, Zigbee, Z-wave, Bluetooth. It doesn’t have to be built into home
devices, but it works with devices that are already connected.
Open to outside developers.

MachineShop is about the ‘Internet of Services’, i.e. providing APIs and service
exchanges to help companies deliver services in the connected world. Raised $3m in
funding on March of 2014.

Picture about people worrying
Privacy,
what about
privacy?
Will the IoT
could widen
the digital
divide?
Do we even
know how to
fix these
things when
they break?
Nah, this stuff’s
for expensive
infrastructure for
the military,
hospitals and
prisons

GET EMOTIONAL
GET EMOTIONAL AGAIN
14/11/2014 20

1. MAKER CULTURE
2. BORINGNESS
3. PLATFORM THINKING

Kamkwamba, who grew up in a tiny rural farming village off the grid in Malawi, was 14
years old in 2001 when he spotted a photo of a windmill in a U.S. textbook one day and
decided to make one.
14/11/2014 23

Harness the power of mobile phones to encourage best practice
for dairy farmers and increase milk production.

“…because of advances in technology, part of the opportunity is now to make the tools
that are needed for production, and prototypes are now democratized” President Obama

EDGEHome senses the electrical
signature from an outlet.
A dashboard provides remote control
and a System Map to control
individual socket or switches.
It can detect when you charge a
laptop -- and turn off the power when
it’s the battery is at 100%.

CubeSensor can detect problems in the
home, including temperature fluctuations,
high humidity, noise pollution, high or low
lighting levels and even barometric
pressure.
There's also a detector for volatile organic
compounds that come from rotting paint or
other airborne toxins.
You can shake it to see a glowing color:
say, blue for healthy detection.

Wally (as in Wall-E) uses the copper wiring
in your home to create a wireless network
to detect leaks and mold.
The kit comes with six small sensors that
you can place next to the toilet, the
dishwasher etc that use a wireless signal
that connects to the WallyHome hub.
So the copper wires in your home act as
an antenna, and you get an alert if a
sensor detects a leak.

PLATFORM WHATNOW?
Instead of creating a product that will work in a market context…
provide the market context
Create the conditions for everyone involved to benefit from the value
exchange
Like a dating service for consumers and producers
Not creating a market, you’re enabling roles
14/11/2014 31

PLATFORM THINKING AT HOME
The goods manufacturing models as we know it couldn’t be more
different to platform models
The success of their linear business model relies almost wholly on the
efficiency of production
Imagine what would happen if they brought the makers and the
buyers together?
14/11/2014 33

Hey Whirlpool, maybe the interconnected home won’t
even have a washer/dryer at all. Maybe it’ll be tapped
into an automated laundry service that will collect,
wash and dry your dirty stuff as the pile reaches a
certain weight. Without a peep (or tweet).

GET EMOTIONAL
GET EMOTIONAL AGAIN
14/11/2014 38

The Next Industrial Revolution

Want your microwave to tell Netflix when your dinner is heated up
so it can cue the rest of the film you started watching? Done.

Want to tell your microwave to start on your way
home using your car’s dashboard? Done.

How about programming your microwave to automatically start
ten minutes into your drive home and cue Game Of Thrones…

On Wednesday nights, only when you’ve been to the gym? Done.

A totally different relationship with stuff. The decline of ownership?

What’s less shit than the connected washing machine?

Solve real problems. Explore preventative healthcare.

Make like the makers:
embrace the open protocols
Think platform thinking:
aka nobody wants your tweeting toaster
Be boring:
you are now in the service industry

Lea Simpson

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Lea Simpson