ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the processes through which homes of the future are evoked via media technologies and architectural designs and how these processes are linked to wider cultural fantasies and social unease about changing gender and family relations, and changing ideas of private and public space. The idea of the smart home accompanied dramatic twentieth-century transformations in architecture and domestic technology. The smart home concept was first advanced in the US in the early twentieth century through homes of tomorrow'. The chapter focuses on the technological possibilities being offered today through cultural representations and material forms of the smart homes of the 1980s and 1990s. Smart houses were designed and built in the US, Europe and Japan. In 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) in the USA launched a Smart Home special interest group to advance the technology within home-building methods. The chapter explores how the digitalised home is envisaged and promoted through marketing, advertising and popular imagery.
