smart studio | projects

camelot

round table discussions and seminars about the living in the future

The purpose was to get a discussion started, in a seminar form, between different groups that are related to the living of the future. These opinions are published in a Telematik publication.

Due to funding by KFB an opportunity to write a publication about Future Living was given. The publication accounts four seminars pursued by researchers from the Smart studio at the Interactive Institute.

Our purpose with the seminars was to get a discussion started between different interest groups with different experience, opinions and ideas. Our hope was, by publicising the material in public, that this discussion would be considered in future building and research. We also wanted to contribute to a more free and critical discussion about IT and our living in the future. Several research questions were raised. What is the living of the future? What are a smart home and an intelligent environment? What does IT in the home mean? How can IT give a positive quality improvement in our homes? How does the different representative’s look at this area? How can we affect it? How could future scenarios look?

Detail from a sketch made at one of the seminars.

Even in the middle of the fifties there were a lot of speculations of what the future living was going to look like. The dominating dream was the little idyllic family with its own house that was well cleaned and stylistically decorated. The entire picture of the society was optimistic. Computer science was something that only researchers worked with and robots belonged to the future. Technology had entered our homes, some to stay some to go. Today, fifty years later, we know that the idyll not was available for all. Big block of flats in enormous areas were built to be rebuilt later on. The population has in the latest couple of years suffered from housing shortage in the cities and housing surplus in the countryside. Unemployment, politics, economy and world climate have affected our vision on living. IT has taken an enormous amount of space, both in the society and in our homes. The gathering names of technology that are used to store, work and transform information are used on a daily basis in our surroundings. You can reach everybody, everywhere, at all time. The borders between public and private are being rubbed out. We can live at work and work at home. Time has become one of our most central conceptions. Time is to be saved and we are supposed to be efficient both in the society, our jobs and in our homes. Is IT the solution of our problems of today or is it another futuristic vision that lacks real foundlings?

The name of the project, Camelot comes from the fact that we built our seminars on round table conversations, like the Knights of the Round Table. We thought that the best way to gather information to this report was by inviting a number of guests to four seminars where we discussed these questions. The groups in respective seminar worked the first part of the seminars in round table conversation and the other part in-groups about different scenarios. In the groups there where partly expert representatives for smart homes and dwelling of the future and partly "ordinary dwellers" that not has expert knowledge. The texts are based on recordings and transcriptions that were made throughout the seminars. Quotes are in some cases easy edited only to facilitate the readability. The report is a description of the project groups common opinions and the seminar discussions. The discussions did not always give unambiguous and common "answers". Important questions were raced and different opinions presented. Throughout the rhetoric was mainly focused on none technology and life qualities instead of IT and homes run by technology. Instead of giving clear answers the report races many questions. Important questions that do not need any immediate answers but more reflection and mindflow. There are opinions that are accounted, "thoughts" and not facts. The opinions agree a lot but disagrees also.