- 10.00 – 10.45: Trial lecture. Title: to be announced
- 12.00 – 16.00: Public defence
Ordinary opponents:
- First opponent: Deborah Chambers, Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, Newcastle University, UK
- Second opponent: Tom Hargreaves, Associate Professor, School of Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, UK
- The chair of the committee: Tine Ustad Figenschou, Professor, Department of Journalism and Media, OsloMet
Leader of the public defence: Liv Klakegg Dahlin, Head of Department of Art, Design and Drama, OsloMet.
Main supervisor: Henry Mainsah, Research Professor, Centre for Welfare and Labour Research, OsloMet.
Co-supervisor: Ardis Storm- Mathisen, Professor, Department of Early Childhood Education, OsloMet.
Abstract
Our lives are increasingly digitalized, rendered into digital data that commercial forces can profit from. With smart home devices aimed at home automation, like smart lights, heaters, robot vacuums, and digital voice assistants, our home lives are also connected to this data economy. While smart home devices promise convenience, efficiency, and fun, they also bring challenges to security, privacy and autonomy at home. Additionally, they are part of the Norwegian government’s solution to various societal challenges, such as an ageing population and the transition to a more sustainable society.
However, there is little research that considers people’s experiences of living with such technologies, considering the tensions between the benefits and the challenges they represent. To contribute to understanding this, I pose the question: How does people’s use of smart technologies impact their experiences in the home?
In this dissertation, I investigate how smart home technology shapes people’s capacity to act within their home and the feelings, sensations and moods this produces. This is done by analyzing both people’s narrative accounts and observations of everyday life with smart home devices. To do so, I conducted digital remote fieldwork including interviews, visual and mobile methods. There are twelve participants from nine different households living with different smart home devices. Among them, there are five women and seven men aged between 24 and 81 years old.
This work is situated between media and cultural studies and science and technology studies. The results are presented in four articles, each considering different everyday situations in which people and smart home technologies interact. The first article is a methodological paper that reflects on the challenges and benefits of remote communication through digital technologies. The second article examines the troubleshooting routines of participants who did not bring the technology into their homes, conceptualized as non-initiators. The third article explores the participants’ affective responses to their digital voice assistants' self-activation. And lastly, the fourth article looks at how people use smart home devices to make the home feel right for them through improvisation.
Findings demonstrate that people’s experiences are shaped through the interplay of smart home devices' material affordances and how people navigate them to make the technology fit their lives. It further shows that people’s experiences are ambivalent, involving intimacy and exposure, convenience and work. Negative experiences are tied to losing control of technology (and in extension, their home environment) and having their safe and private home exposed to external, commercial forces.
However, the dissertation further shows that people emphasize experiences of seamlessness and fun, while ignoring or downplaying any that conflict with this. This can have political and innovative implications in that sidelining the negative experiences in favor of the positive ones leaves little incentive to change or improve the technology and its political regulation. The dissertation argues that producers of smart home technologies and political ambitions to use the smart home as a site for intervention need to consider how these technologies affect people living with them, affectively.
