Living interiors in the digital age: the Smart Home

Domotics is a term derived from the contraction of the Latin word domus (home) and the disciplines of informatics, telematics and robotics. With the advent of the mechanization era at the beginning of the XX century “home automation” started to revolutionize domestic interiors with labor-saving machines, lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems that have been grown ever faster with the introduction of electric power distribution. Even so, writing about the Smart Home implicates a deeper understanding of how technologies advent have modified (and will modify) our life and living spaces not only from a “domotical” prospective. The passage from the mechanization era to the digital era is a critic step of our contemporary history. As technology changes so do society, the environment, and the practice of architecture and design. The globalizing “network society” has forced architects and designers to readapt their work to new modalities of production and construction, new patterns of movement and settlement, new cultural priorities and new space and objects typologies that have radically changed our living environment.