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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.