A couple of years ago, I asked colleagues on the Sketching in Hardware mailing list for a list of references on the “smart house” theme. It comes up with some frequency in digital technology classes, and it seemed worthwhile to collect the references. The list below was graciously offered by Ellen Do, Mark Gross, Lenore Edman, Bjoern Hartmann, Scott Minneman, Josh Bloom, Lars Erik Holmquist, Leah Buechley, Wendy Ju, Noam Zomerfeld, CHad Vavra, Rob Faludi, Alicia Gibb, and Carlyn Maw.
Allen, E. (ed.) (1974) The responsive house: selected papers and discussions from the Shirt-Sleeve Session in Responsive Housebuilding Technologies held at the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 3-5, 1972. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Ellis, W. (2013) Warren Ellis: ‘Lich-House,’ a short story, Boing Boing. Available at: https://boingboing.net/2013/07/29/warren-ellis-lich-house.html (Accessed: 11 May 2024).
Mike Mozer’s Adaptive House at CU Boulder is well-known in the field and worth close review. A few readings:
- Mozer, M.C. (2004) ‘Lessons from an Adaptive Home’, in D.J. Cook and S.K. Das (eds) Smart Environments. 1st edn. Wiley, pp. 271–294. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/047168659X.ch12.
- World’s ‘Smartest’ House Created By CU-Boulder Team (no date) EurekAlert! Available at: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1014088 (Accessed: 11 May 2024).
- Mozer, M.C. (1998) ‘The Neural Network House: An Environment that Adapts to its Inhabitants’. Appears in: M. Coen (Ed.), Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on Intelligent Environments (pp. 110-114). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. 1998.
Newitz, A. (2018) ‘“When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”’, Slate, 29 December. Available at: https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/annalee-newitz-short-story-when-robot-and-crow-saved-east-st-louis.html (Accessed: 11 May 2024).
Butler, O.E. (2012) Lilith’s brood. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. Available at: https://search.worldcat.org/title/806965819 (Accessed: 11 May 2024). Quoting Leah, “The Lillith’s Brood series by Octavia Butler also features smart houses, next level.”
How Smart Does Your Bed Have To Be, Before You Are Afraid To Go To Sleep At Night? (1994). Gold, R. for Ars Electronica, Austria. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20040207073949/http:/www.richgold.org/SMART/HTML/slide1.html (Accessed: 11 May 2024).
Sensors & IoT Infrastructure | Disruptive Technologies (no date). Available at: https://www.disruptive-technologies.com (Accessed: 19 December 2023).
Bradbury, R. (1950) ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’. Originally published in 1950, this Ray Bradbury short story is a favorite of many folks who research this area. There are many versions of it worth reading and listening to, among them Leonard Nimoy’s reading of it.
Demon Seed (1977) [Trailer]). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4jWyyhyxSg&ab_channel=Superamak (Accessed: 11 May 2024).
House of Whacks – YouTube (no date). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPpuON9W7BQ&ab_channel=TheSimpsonsandAnimeChannel (Accessed: 11 May 2024). Parody from The Simpsons.
Smart House (1999). Disney, Alan Sacks Productions, directed by LeVar Burton. Quoting the IMDB summary: “A teenager wins a fully-automated dream house in a competition, but soon the computer controlling it begins to take over and everything gets out of control. Then teenage Ben must calm the computer named PAT.”
There is an ongoing Zotero group of these references at this link.
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