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Smarter Homes
Smarter Homes by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino Review: A Thoughtful Industry Guide for IoT Designers
Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life is a 2018 non-fiction industry guide by interaction designer and IoT thought leader Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, published by Apress, that traces the history of smart home technology and critically examines how consumer products for the connected home are designed, marketed, and shaped by dominant players such as Amazon, Google, and Apple — aimed squarely at product designers, R&D professionals, and trends researchers.
LuvemBooks Verdict
Best for
Product designers, R&D professionals, trends researchers, and IoT entrepreneurs who want a historically and culturally grounded framework for developing connected-home products — rather than another technical implementation guide.
Worth it if
You work in smart home product development or IoT trends research and want to understand the cultural, social, and design-ethics context that dominant platforms like Amazon, Google, and Apple have largely bypassed.
Skip if
You're a general consumer looking for practical advice on choosing, installing, or setting up smart home devices — this book offers strategic and contextual analysis, not product recommendations or setup guidance.
What readers & critics say
A reviewer at codecentric.de praised the book for helping "smart home enthusiasts make up their own minds by providing the socio-economic, historical, architectural and aesthetic context, thus filling significant knowledge gaps," while iyarweb.wordpress.com, reporting from an IoT Hessen meetup where Deschamps-Sonsino presented the book, offered a contemporaneous account of its reception among IoT practitioners.
Sources: codecentric.de, iyarweb.wordpress.comAsk LuvemBooks
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Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life is a 2018 industry guide by IoT thought leader Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino that traces the cultural and design history of the connected home, critically examining how dominant players like Amazon, Google, and Apple have shaped — and constrained — product development in the space. Essential reading for product designers, R&D professionals, and trends researchers, it offers a rare synthesis of historical grounding and design-ethics analysis that sets it apart from narrowly technical smart home writing. Readers seeking practical setup or purchasing guidance will find little here — the book's value is strategic and contextual, not instructional.
- Is it worth reading?
- For its intended professional audience — product designers, R&D professionals, and trends researchers — Smarter Homes offers genuine value that holds up despite its 2018 publication date: the foundational questions it raises about cultural history, social behavior, and design ethics in connected-product development remain relevant to the ongoing expansion of the IoT sector. Deschamps-Sonsino's practitioner authority, evidenced by her ranking first on Postscapes' 2016 list of 100 IoT Influencers and her role as the first UK distributor of Arduino, lends the analysis real credibility. The main caveat is that its critical stance is more diagnostic than prescriptive — it is stronger on identifying the industry's copy-paste dependency than on charting a precise path forward for individual product teams, and specific product references naturally reflect the 2018 market landscape.
- Who should read this?
- Smarter Homes is squarely aimed at product designers, R&D professionals, trends researchers, and business owners exploring IoT opportunities who want a historically and culturally grounded framework for connected-home development. The thematic chapters on "Living As a Service" and "Assistive Technologies" are highlighted as particularly useful conceptual scaffolding for trends researchers thinking beyond the current generation of voice-assistant-anchored devices. General consumers, or anyone seeking practical installation or purchasing guidance, are explicitly outside the book's target audience.
- Similar books
- Readers drawn to Smarter Homes for its blend of technology analysis and design thinking may also find value in a handful of neighboring titles. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future offers a broader macro-level analysis of where technology is taking everyday life, complementing Deschamps-Sonsino's connected-home focus. For a cultural and spatial lens on how buildings are inhabited and repurposed, Geoff Manaugh's A Burglar's Guide to the City applies similarly unconventional thinking to built environments. Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live approaches home design from a human-centered perspective that echoes the book's concern with how people actually live in spaces rather than how technology imagines they do.
- What are the main themes?
- Smarter Homes weaves together several interconnected themes: the cultural and design history of the connected home; the industry's over-reliance on dominant platforms like Amazon, Google, and Apple; the social dimensions of how technology enters domestic spaces (including sections titled "The Nagging Home" and "The New Bohemians"); and the ethical responsibilities of product developers, addressed in chapters on "Digital Responsibility" and "Creative Criticism." The book also gives notable attention to assistive technologies, framing the smart home as a space with meaningful implications for accessibility and care — not merely convenience and entertainment.
- Why should I trust this author?
- Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino brings verifiable practitioner authority to the subject: she was ranked first on Postscapes' 2016 list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers, and her company Tinker was the first distributor of the Arduino platform in the United Kingdom. Her work as an interaction designer has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the London Design Museum — credentials that ground the book's analysis in hands-on industry experience rather than academic speculation.
- How should I use this book?
- Because Smarter Homes is organised room by room and theme by theme, readers can navigate directly to the chapters most relevant to their own work rather than reading cover to cover — a product team focused on kitchen appliances can head straight to that chapter, while trends researchers may prioritise the "Living As a Service" and "Assistive Technologies" sections. The book functions best as a strategic and contextual reference — a framework for thinking about where the smart home market has been and where it might go — rather than as a step-by-step implementation guide. Given the 2018 publication date, readers should treat specific product references as period snapshots and focus on the historical and cultural arguments, which retain their relevance.
Summarize this book
Is it worth reading?
Who should read this?
What are the main themes?
Why should I trust this author?
How should I use this book?
Summarize this book
Published by Apress in 2018, Smarter Homes is a non-fiction industry guide by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino — interaction designer, IoT consultant, and the first UK distributor of the Arduino platform — that argues product developers in the smart home space have operated with a copy-paste mindset, following Amazon, Google, and Apple rather than drawing on deeper historical and cultural foundations. The book is organized room by room (living room, kitchen, bathroom, garage, garden, and more) and broadens into thematic chapters on "Living As a Service," "Assistive Technologies," and "Digital Responsibility," covering the social, cultural, and design-ethics dimensions of connected-home development. Its central goal is to equip practitioners with the historical context and critical framework needed to build more thoughtful, original smart home products.
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A focused, critically minded industry guide, Smarter Homes makes the case that understanding history and cultural context is the essential first step for anyone building products for the connected home.
What the Book Actually Is and Argues
Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life (Design Thinking) by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino front cover
Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life is a non-fiction industry guide, not a consumer how-to manual. Published by Apress in 2018, it is written by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino — an interaction designer, product designer, consultant, and entrepreneur whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the London Design Museum.
The book's central argument, as stated in its own publisher description, is that product developers working in the smart home space have largely operated with a copy-paste mindset, following the lead of larger businesses such as Amazon, Google, and Apple rather than drawing on deeper historical and cultural wellsprings. Deschamps-Sonsino sets out to correct that by presenting the history of smart homes alongside the many players — from science fiction writing and the entertainment industry to modern interior design and architecture movements — that have shaped collective aspirations around the connected home.
Scope and Structure
The book is organized room by room and theme by theme, giving it a practical architecture that mirrors how people actually inhabit their homes. Chapters move through the living room (covering picture frames, radios, sound systems, televisions, and thermostats), the children's bedroom, the master bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the entrance, doors, cameras, the garage, and the garden.
Beyond the domestic tour, the book broadens into emerging themes: sections titled "Living As a Service," "The New Bohemians," "The Nagging Home," and "Assistive Technologies" signal that Deschamps-Sonsino is interested in social and cultural dimensions of smart home technology, not merely its technical specifications. A concluding chapter on "Digital Responsibility" and "Creative Criticism" reinforces the book's design-ethics orientation.
This structure makes it straightforward for readers to navigate toward the spaces and questions most relevant to their own work.
Strengths: Credentials, Context, and Critical Perspective
Deschamps-Sonsino brings verifiable authority to this subject. She was named first in Postscapes' 2016 list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers, and her company Tinker was the first distributor of the Arduino platform in the United Kingdom — credentials that ground her analysis in hands-on industry experience rather than academic speculation.
The book's stated learning outcomes reflect genuine breadth: readers are directed to understand the historical context for current smart home products, review the social dimensions of home product development, discover new technologies being developed or already available, and track industry behaviors that may affect longer-term market trends for consumer products. That the book explicitly asks product developers to look beyond dominant platforms and toward cultural, artistic, and design history is a distinguishing feature in a field where most writing focuses narrowly on technical implementation.
Limitations and Audience Fit
The book is explicitly addressed to a professional and semi-professional audience: product designers, R&D teams, trends researchers, and business owners exploring IoT opportunities. General consumers curious about setting up a smart home will find little practical installation or purchasing guidance here.
The book's value is strategic and contextual rather than instructional. Additionally, the smart home space moves quickly, and a guide published in 2018 — however carefully researched — reflects the product landscape and dominant platforms of that moment; readers should approach specific product references with that temporal context in mind.
Some readers may also note that the book's critical stance toward the copy-paste culture of the industry, while intellectually valuable, is more diagnostic than prescriptive: it is stronger on identifying the problem than on charting a precise path forward for individual product teams.
Relevance and Who Will Benefit Most
Despite its 2018 publication date, the foundational questions Smarter Homes raises — about how cultural history, social behavior, and design ethics should inform connected-product development — remain as relevant as the ongoing expansion of the IoT sector itself. The publisher positions the book as a resource for anyone working in product design and development who wants to understand what has been done before and identify avenues for future development.
For that audience, Deschamps-Sonsino's room-by-room framework combined with her thematic chapters on emerging trends offers a rare synthesis of historical grounding and forward-looking industry analysis. Readers in trends research, in particular, will find the sections on "Living As a Service" and "Assistive Technologies" a useful conceptual scaffold for thinking about where the smart home market is heading beyond the current generation of voice-assistant-anchored devices.
Sources & Further Reading
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iyarweb.wordpress.com
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