Maybe before the idea of the desktop was the idea of “home”. Home is where all things can be found and started from. It is a merge between destination and start point.
The Internet of Things (IoT) brings the idea of home one step further. Control and monitoring of the physical home and all the appliances within is now commonplace. Nest, Alexa, X-Box, Hive, Apple Home just a few of the vendors.
The boundary traditionally drawn around the computer screen has been eroded. Our home space and our information space have collided. In that space we are no longer visitors who can go back home, we are here, permanent participants in a physical and information merged habitat. (Predicted by Bill Mitchell in his 1995 book City of Bits).
A new home page is doubly valuable because the border between work and home has also dissolved. Work is not just a place that is a location, it is with you always, in your pocket as an email, as an IM, on a website, in a phone call. We are always “on”. There was a time, a few decades ago, when going to work and coming home were two discreet entities. Long before that they were one – when we were farming homesteaders. Now home and work seem closely aligned again. If a new all encompassing home can be captured its value is made even greater because it includes work.
Every manufacturer of home appliances – fridges, cookers, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, TVs, heating systems, lights, curtains windows all have IoT systems. In EyeSpyFX we are working on a number of these projects. Information companies also think of home as their natural territory. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all have Home systems.
The merge between physical space and information is incomplete at this moment in time. IoT devices are a still a little bit clunky – they have gateways and need to be paired. Information is still mostly accessed via a screen. But this is just a moment in time and our current model is just transitional. Steadily physical space and information are coming together. Expect high stakes and profound change!
There is also a cyber hippy point about harmony and home. Home is a personal and family living space. We protect it, nurture it and shape it. The attainment of home as a physical and information hybrid entity is a gold rush for the soul.