Imagining a Soft and Relational Smart Home

This paper presents three scenario-based speculations accompanied by material explorations of soft IoT for smart homes based on humidity data. Cycle Lines tracks and displays weekly patterns of humidity levels shown as colored lines in a woven display, Relationscape, a real-time tracker and knitted display of humidity showing the relation between two different households, and Eco-collective, embroidery IoT that changes color depending on the humidity levels of different objects in the household. Based on first-person engagements with humidity sensors placed in the authors’ homes, they imagine new types of soft IoT devices that sense and display relations to humidity data, suggesting a role for mundane,craft-based IoT for smart homes. They express the relational nature of humidity and how it is tied to well-being in the home, among household members and other human and more-than-human inhabitants, as well as the environmental conditions inside and outside of the home. The soft, craft-based approach to imagining futures of IoT for smart homes has feminist commitments and invites for further problematizing domestic labor practices and craft activism in the domestic context.