User Perceptions and Experiences with Smart Homes - The Smart Home as an Obedient Guard Dog, Disinterested Cat, Ambitious Octopus or Busy Beehive

We investigated people’s experience with living in shared smart homes, involving both smart home initiators and maintainers (primary users) as well as other inhabitants (secondary users). Through a cultural probe study with 35 participants from 16 shared homes and follow-up interviews with a subset, we gained insights into people’s understanding of smart home technology, their ideas for the future, their experiences with the technology, and how they relate to their smart home. Our findings highlight how the role taken (primary or secondary user) influences how smart homes are experienced and understood in everyday life, and how ’smartness’ is defined. The study further investigates how people describe their smart home ’as a living being’, yielding a wide range of animal metaphors, that reveal character traits that people associate with smart home technology.