Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life (Design
A design thinking examination of how connected technology is reshaping domestic life, tracing the history of home automation and questioning who smart homes are really designed for.
$28.66 on AmazonRead our full reviewAt a glance
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
Was this helpful?
- 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
Follow up
Synthesized from verified book data & published reviews · How we review
Press Enter to ask. Answers come from our editorial Q&A — start typing to see related questions.
Age & Reading Level
Recommended age
Adult
Reading level
Adult
Skip if you're looking for practical smart home setup, purchasing guidance, or product recommendations.
Editorial Review
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.
Read the Full ReviewRelated reading
Adjacent titles worth exploring. We haven't reviewed these yet, so they link out to Amazon.