James Dyson doesn’t think smart homes are, well, smart enough.
The 69-year-old British inventor, who has been reimagining household appliances for decades, isn’t impressed with trendy home systems that allow users to control their environment through a screen.
“Personally, I think that’s going in the wrong direction,” he says.
What he’d like to see — what he believes he will see — are homes that seamlessly react to our actions and, eventually, desires. “When you look at the blinds or gesture to the blinds, they open,” he says. In this version of the future, temperature, lighting, the level of moisture in the air and other factors will automatically adjust to our individual preferences, in part by reading our biometric data. If you’ve just come home from a workout and are overheated, your home would register this, and respond by momentarily lowering the temperature.
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And homes of the future won’t just react to external commands; they’ll also fluctuate according to changes in temperature, sunlight and other external factors much in the same way Dyson’s air purifier monitors and automatically adjusts airflow depending on the surrounding air quality.
In five, 10 years this is how all our appliances should react. “We have no need to have the rather basic and crude controls that we have at the moment in the home,” he says. “There’s no need for it.”