The Smart Home : Logistical media, infrastructure and practiced places

Abstract: This master thesis in media and communication studies explores the concept of the smart home, which by various industries within communication, information and energy business alongside property developers is expected to be the model for future living, housing and infrastructure development. Departing from a theoretical framework highlighting media and infrastructure as temporal and spatial phenomena, the analysis shows how the smart home arranges and manages both means of time and space due to its saturation of information technologies in the form of sensors, applications and data visualizations. The result of the study suggests that the smart home could be understood as a logistical medium, although the temporal bias present in the expectations on future living suggests that the purpose of the smart home is to sustain a flow of logistics and capital both over space and over time; the latter in terms of sustainability.