By Dr Ryan Casey, School of Social and Political Sciences

Overview

Connected Homes is a pilot project that seeks to explore the ways in which digital connectivity, data-driven services and home life are interconnected in a rural area. Households are increasingly reliant on digital connectivity for many aspects of their daily lives, accessed via ‘lively technologies’ including tools, devices, and systems used for remote working, online learning, platform-based consumption, telehealth and digitally-mediated care, streamed entertainment, and for digitally mediated relationships, technologies assessed via platforms, social media, mobile apps, smart devices, and sensors. Given this reliance, it is important to understand how connected homes meet the needs and desires of households so that they can better support household wellbeing. Households living in rural areas increasingly depend on connected homes in their everyday lives, so we seek to address how rural households and its members want to live with digital technologies, what they need from connected homes, and what the home and the technologies need to provide. In this pilot project, we start to explore some of the characteristics of connected homes and to develop working concepts and methodologies for further research. The aims of this pilot project are to:

  • To gain an initial understanding about how to develop connected homes in rural areas that are sensitive, ethical, and appropriate because they understand and give voice to households and their members.
  • To explore how to co-create new knowledge, concepts, theories, and designs of connected homes through interdisciplinary research and multi-sector collaboration.
  • To identify what practices are appropriate, which stakeholders and what type of open and inclusive innovation process are required to ensure that the design of connected homes and data-driven services create the homes that households need.

The project is based in Dumfries, as a partnership between the University of Glasgow (UoG) and the Crichton Trust (CT), which is part of a wider UoG and CT collaboration. One of the reasons for this is to build upon The Crichton Trust’s 2018 Care Campus project, which found that households are increasingly reliant on digital and smart technologies to support wellbeing. We will explore this further to better understand how connected homes can meet the needs and desires of households, enhance people’s home lives, and make Dumfries a good place to live. The research design is based on a participatory approach in household and technology studies. Fieldwork includes household focus groups, walking interviews, and co-creation design methods including diary elicitation and a collaborative design workshop. This is complemented by document analysis of public local government, central government (UK and Scottish), and research reports.

Fieldwork for this pilot project is currently underway. Ryan, our researcher, is working with 4 households recruited in the Dumfries and Galloway region to complete one-day diaries, facilitate focus group discussions, and conduct walking interviews. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, fieldwork has pivoted to remote interactions by phone, video, and email. We are also planning for our co-creation design workshop in mid-March.

 

Why is this project important?

The connected home has become so central to individual and household wellbeing that understanding these dimensions is essential for all stakeholders in an equitable, healthy, and sustainable society: employers, consumer technology and service providers, health and social care practitioners, housing developers, local government, public and community services, and of course, the members of households themselves.

A distinctive shift in the use of digital technology in the home is that it involves data driven services, where the technologies learn from the households through the data they provide, making them, what is termed ‘lively’. This means that households need to interact with data as well as with technology. This goes beyond the household domestication of technology, to the socialisation of technology through data. Therefore, although, the connected home has advantages in terms of access to service provision, health, employment, education and communication, there are risks such as isolation, exclusion, digital harm, and threats to privacy. Understanding how the connected home meets the needs and desires of households, in all their diversity, without reinforcing or increasing inequalities is a major challenge.

You can now read a briefing paper summarising learnings from this project:

Connected Homes final report

First published: 24 January 2022

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