Smart(ening up the modern) home: Redesigning power dynamics through domestic space digitalization

The project Smart(ening up the modern) home: Redesigning power dynamics through domestic space digitalization (SMARTUP) explores how digitalization impacts domestic space. It examines what happens to home when it becomes smart/er, explores what "smartness" of and at home means, and addresses the consequences of home smartening. Home has long been defined by dichotomies such as outside and inside, public and private, work and care, masculine and feminine, human and non-human. The digital transformation of home reworks these dichotomies as well as their corollary power dynamics, especially since smartening up has intensified in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. SMARTUP investigates how home has been transformed by digitalization, and with what consequences in relation to 1) the understanding of (smart) home, 2) the ways (smart) home as a dwelling has become to be imagined, planned and designed, and 3) its everyday forms as practised and experienced. These three foci are to be researched within an interdisciplinary trans-European consortium bringing together insights from across social sciences, design studies and (post)humanities. SMARTUP will produce a unique, interdisciplinary approach to the transformations brought about by the proliferation of digital technologies in contemporary homes, which promises to extensively add to the theory building on, and scholarly reconceptualization of "home". In collaboration with practitioners (of smart home design & production), and civic and cultural institutions, SMARTUP will identify the multiple impacts of digital transformation on home and its wider societal and cultural implications, thus closing a gap in knowledge about the consequences of the process of smartening-up of home pertaining to different academic disciplines. Overall, the project will identify societal and conceptual challenges posed by intensification of smartening up of home as well as offer practical and theoretical ways to solve them.