‘We’re the cheap smart home’: the actually existing smart home as rented and shared

Abstract

The definition and materialization of smart homes has changed over time in accordance with technological advancements and changing housing trajectories. Despite this, to date little research has problematized what different household types and tenure mean for the smart home. As housing markets become more diverse and technology becomes increasingly embedded in the everyday, critical attention needs to be paid to ways in which technologies are being used to mediate households beyond the owner-occupied, nuclear family home. Thinking critically about this is necessary in order to better understand the benefits and pernicious effects of technology on people who have different needs for technology within the home due to different tenures and different materializations of housing and home. This article situates the rented and shared house as the ‘actually existing’ smart home. It shows that those sharing housing use smart technologies performatively, subversively and as an infrastructure of care across all stages of the share housing cycle – from finding a place to live, to managing the household and maintaining relationships. In doing so the shared smart home offers an alternative smart home reflecting a household diversity that smart home discourse has, to date, largely been blind to.