Humanising smart homes: For lived praxis in the digital age

Smart homes exemplify the contested pathways of the digitalisation of everyday life. Smart home systems promise improved comfort, resource optimisation, and efficiency, yet in practice they generate implementation inconsistencies, unfulfilled promises, and contradictions. Existing social science literature offers valuable critiques of smart home imaginaries and the recurring challenges that follow their deployment, as manifested in uneven uptake, routine override, hidden maintenance burdens, and issues of privacy and control. However, there remains only limited insight into epistemic architecture and negotiated practice as the very origin of these implementation challenges. Drawing on critical praxis traditions, we introduce the idea of lived praxis, which allows smart homes to be conceptualised as practical contradictions emerging through the ongoing inter-actor production of domestic space-time. We argue that ‘smartness’ is continually assembled—and destabilised—through the praxis of co-aligning technical knowledge, standards, and contractual requirements with everyday dwelling practices, mediated by phronetic judgement (practical wisdom) about what is doable, acceptable, and ‘good enough’. We further operationalise this insight as a diagnostic tool that translates practical contradictions into leverage points for devising more socially acceptable and just smart homes.