The Future Home: A Smart, Green, Machine for Living In

I've been working with Hive on a project looking at the future of the smart home with particular regard to sustainability. This post forms part of that (paid) project. Almost 100 years ago, Le Corbusier wrote about the house as a “machine for living in”. It sounds a little cold compared to the cosy visions we have of home. But his ideas of form separated from function continue to shape modern architecture. I wonder whether he would approve of the modern smart home? After all, here we are adding function to a long-established form. We are improving the machine for living in, in many ways.

Every home is getting smarter

The smart home concept has been around a long time. By adding sensors, switches, and computing power, we can make the home more efficient, luxurious, secure, and comfortable. It is only in the last decade though that the smart home has become truly accessible to most people. Before then, it was what I call ‘footballer tech’: only available to those with the disposable income to buy the hardware and pay an expert to do the installation. Today your plumber or electrician can install systems, and many items you can simply pick up and plug in. If you can use a smartphone, you can create a smart home.The result is that adoption has rocketed. Hive alone has hardware in more than 1.9 million homes across the UK, whether that's a smart thermostat, smart lights, alarm, or a collection of those devices all controlled by the same app. Over 70% of our survey respondents said they already have some form of smart home tech, and are controlling their homes remotely to give themselves warmth, light and security when they need them, and to ensure they’re not wasting energy when they don’t. But where do we go from here?

Smaller, cheaper, more accessible

My seven predictions for the future smart home are predicated on two simple ideas. First, that digital technology will continue to get smaller, cheaper, and more accessible. This is a safe bet since this pattern has been consistent for the last 60 years Even if we reach the limits of physics in improving our current range of technologies – and we are hitting the limits for silicon chips – there are other technologies on the horizon. As long as manufacturing can keep up with demand, prices will continue to fall.Every time we make our computers more powerful, we tend to use a good chunk of that power to make them easier to use. Just look at how we communicate with computers today versus sixty years ago. We’ve gone from punched tape, to graphical interfaces, to touchscreens, and now voice control. What next? I suspect we will add even more intelligence into our homes to help them work on our behalf. Why use a voice command when your home just knows what you want?

Removing friction

The second principle behind my predictions is that we as humans love anything that strips the friction from our lives. Rewind three million years and our distant ancestors were already making tools, sharpening stones to make food preparation easier. Throughout human history we have defined each era by its technology - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Steam Age – because technology is so important to us. Because it makes our lives easier.We will adopt more smart home technology if and when it makes life easier. That it also helps us fulfil our goals for more sustainable living is a huge bonus, and that is something 88% of us are striving for . But that alone is probably not enough. We want easier living so that we can focus our time, energy, and critically, money, on the people and things that are most important to us.

Communes and robots

The way we live, and work is changing, so any smart home must work in that context. We tend to be single until later in life now, sharing homes with friends or family, or increasingly living on build-to-rent campuses. These modern blocks offer smaller apartments with shared facilities for everything you might need: gym, cinema room, café, gardens, workspace. They’re one of the fastest growing types of home in the UK and around the world . And they are all built with integrated smart home technologies.More and more of us are working remotely, or for ourselves, so workspace is becoming increasingly important. Either some space carved out in our home or shared and sustainable office space nearby. How do we carve out space in homes that are shrinking? The average living room has shrunk by a third since the 70s, so we’re not exactly spoiled for space. One idea is transformers: robotic furniture that can change function at the touch of a button. Kitchen tables become standing desks, shelves swing out into dividers, sofas roll away to free up floor space.Robotic furniture will also take on more of the chores. We still spend over an hour a day washing and cleaning. Wardrobes that iron and fold are on the fringes right now, but I’m certainly ready for them to go mainstream and I don’t think I’m alone. We might see robots helping with the food too. Maybe not a robot chef just yet, but perhaps an automated hydroponics system to keep you in fresh salad veg.

EVs and virtual power plants

Powering all these robots in a sustainable fashion will fall to a combination of solar cells on the roof and battery storage in the basement - or in your car. With the deadline for the end of petrol and diesel sales approaching in 2030, I estimate perhaps a third of us will be driving electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Nearly two thirds of us have space for home charging . When they’re not on the move, EVs make great energy stores, turning your home into a ‘virtual power plant’, part of a new networked energy grid that can share power with the homes around you or with the rest of the nation.Underpinned by this sustainable generation and storage, tomorrow’s smart home becomes a greener place to live. But also, an easier place to live, where the machine takes more of the strain.##My full set of predictions are as follows:1. Smart tech will be the norm: “It’s not that long since smart homes were what I call “footballer tech”, confined to the elite. But in just a small space of time, this has entirely changed. Technology advances at an incredible pace, getting more powerful, cheaper, and most importantly, easier to use. As we continue to innovate, smart home products geared towards sustainability will become the norm in the home. The smart meter rollout continues. Every time people replace their thermostats, lightbulbs, or other home tech, they will find that the obvious options will increasingly be smart ones. By 2030, almost every UK home will have some form of smart tech.”2. Semi-communal living will become increasingly popular: “As we look to prioritise sustainability, and people continue to live in shared accommodation well into their 30s, there will be a rise in semi-communal living: smaller private homes with a lot of shared spaces. With homes shrinking and more of us working remotely, this is a good model for a more sustainable future: modern, well-insulated and sustainably heated homes with access to amenities – including remote working spaces – all within walking distance.* Smart tech will play a key role in helping us to make the most of shared spaces, managing access, setting heat and lighting to our preferences, and ensuring security. As well as people sharing more spaces, we’ll also see a rise in micro grids, especially in new builds, where you can share energy within the community. This means energy can easily be transferred to different homes, instead of wasted.”3. The home will take part in the future energy system: “More homes in the future will generate and store energy and will be rewarded for making their homes part of the energy grid. Around a million homes in the UK have solar photovoltaics today – and that number is growing. Though the percentage of individual households adding small (sub 4kw) solar installations is only increasing at about 3.6% per year, the next class of installation (4-10kw) seems to be growing much faster.** But it’s not just solar power that is set to increase, we’re also likely to see more and more people using other technology and taking part in the future energy system, be it smart water tanks, heat pumps, EV chargers and home batteries.”4. 15-20% of the UK will continue to work from home: “Over 40% of the UK worked remotely in lockdown. This is likely to drop back to around 15-20% as we exit this period, but then start to climb again towards 2030. Our homes are poorly insulated compared to modern offices, so those choosing to remain at home, may look to make savings from commuting on retrofitting their home, better insulation, ventilation, and sound-proofing – all of which have added green benefits. Using one centralised app, such as the Hive app, we’ll see more people linking their devices together in one eco-system to better manage their heating and electricity bills. For example, ensuring lights only turn on when someone is in the room, or linking their smart thermostat such as Hive Active Heating to Hive radiator valves to have greater control over the heating in individual rooms.”***5. Suburban office shares to take the load off the home: “With more of us working remotely, and a lot more freelance workers, suburban office shares will be in demand. Lockdown has seen couples and flatmates arguing over who gets the kitchen table and the biggest share of the broadband. With our smaller homes, people will be seeking out extra space – especially the 20% of the workforce I estimate might be self-employed by 2030. Users of these spaces will be looking for somewhere warm and light, but also somewhere with good sustainable characteristics.”6. The electric vehicle revolution will be driven into force: “As we edge closer to new legislation banning diesel and petrol cars coming into play, the number of electric vehicles on the road is set to grow fast. Based on the typical replacement rate for cars in the UK, and the rapid growth of EV sales, I estimate around a third of all UK cars will be electric by 2030. Electric vehicle prices will continue to fall, and the technology will continue to improve. More brands will open up charging at home as part of a wider eco-system of smart tech, including Hive, adding convenience, and integrating energy storage into your smart home.” ****7. One giant computer: robot furniture and cleaners “Computers are making their way into everything, turning the home into one giant computer – a true ‘machine designed for living’, as Corbusier would have called it. We’ll see more robot furniture that can transform at the touch of a button to make the best use of your living space. Robot wardrobes that press and fold your clothes. And smaller, sleeker, and cheaper robot mops and vacuums. Smart hydroponics systems, to give you a constant supply of salad veg will be more mainstream.”##To hear more about Hive’s eco-system of smart products visit: https://www.hivehome.com/

Disrupting housebuilding

Every year, everyone seems to agree that we need to build more homes. But while the number was growing up until the end of last year (we shall see what impact COVID has had), we're still a way from the government's target of 300,000 a year. And even at current levels (around 240,000 built or converted last year), house prices continue to soar. The average house price is now over 10 times the average household income.So how do we build more homes? More importantly, how do we build more homes in the places people want them? Homes that fulfil people's changing needs? And whose construction and use has a minimal, or even positive impact on the environment?I think the answer might come from some of the most successful businesses of the last few years. Businesses that build scale through networks of small operations, like Uber and AirBnB. These businesses have their ethical issues, and their operational issues too. But the principle of scaling small things is a powerful one.This is an essay. It's not something anyone has paid me to research. And hence I'm not going to get everything right here. But hear me out. I'd love to hear your feedback. This is my recipe for a disruptive housebuilder.

Three principles

My disruptive housebuilder would operate on three simple principles:

1. Make it easier to build than buy
2. Make it cheaper to build than rent
3. Give people security and sustainability

How would you do this?

Deeply digital

Imagine aggregating all of the small plots of land around the UK into a single, liquid marketplace. Imagine wrapping around them a layer of digital services for surveying and planning, creating a low friction pipeline for acquiring and developing sites. LandInsight has already done most of the work here, with its award-winning platform (I was one of the judges a few years ago when it won the PlaceTech Prize for Innovation). Take its API and build from there.Now people can search for parcels of land near them and begin to progress them. A truly liquid market for land with some of the complexity of planning and utilisation removed will attract more people wanting to sell their land, increasing the size of the market.This somewhat glosses over the complexities of the planning space. But many, small scale projects should be much easier to progress than large scale projects that attract a lot of attention. Especially if you standardise some of the homes.

Open Source Design

I'm not talking about ticky-tacky boxes on a hillside here. I think the starting point for this housebuilder should be WikiHouse, an open, modular system of house design with a relatively low carbon footprint and a huge degree of flexibility. Imagine being able to design your house in an app like the IKEA kitchen configurator. Once you have picked your plot, the system pulls in 3D scans of the area and allows you to overlay the footprint and a 3D render of your house, with a range of design options and interior fittings from its catalogue. Or you can choose a bare shell with utilities and fit it out yourself.The great thing about WikiHouse is that it is largely manufactured off-site in small, local workshops. You don't need to own these as the developer, just have access to a network of them and monitor standards. Over time this will get easier as individual housebuilders start to contribute reviews.Once the design is approved, customer can select a local manufacturer to produce their panels and frame. You will also need local contractors to assemble the home. But the nature of WikiHouse means it requires a lot less skilled labour - an issue already and one that will grow as we go through Brexit. You could either plug into an existing network of contractors, like RatedPeople. Or build one up. And as the business grows, you are likely to develop a class of freelance contractor that specialises in assembly.

Funding

This all sounds well and good. But it's not that radical. Mostly just plugging together existing networks with some nice front end design. What makes this housebuilder really disruptive is the funding. Imagine if you could take great gobs of investment, from pension funds, venture capital, or even government, and use it to do home financing differently. After all, based on the business described above, you wouldn't need to spend that much actually building anything. You're leveraging existing assets. And there is a lot of cash around at the moment, seeking reliable returns. Where better to invest than in property? Even with the population set to start declining in the second half of the century, it doesn't look like demand for quality homes will shrink any time soon.Use that funding to make deposits small. Not much bigger than you might put down on a rental. But base it on smarter credit checks that overcome some of the weaknesses inherent in current systems - like the ones that would deny me a mortgage because I'm self-employed even though I haven't missed a payment in 15 years. Though there are arguably issues with privacy, banks in China have been making heavy use of alternative data sources. Not just "have you paid your credit card bill in the past" but who you are based on social media and more. This has allowed them to process loans automatically, and incredibly quickly, with very low rates of non-repayment.Offer people a truly flexible mortgage. Shared ownership options from 10% up to 100%. Make it variable over time. When times are good, increase your payments to buy more of the equity. When they're bad, trade equity for a payment holiday or switch seamlessly to interest only. The aim is to keep people covering the cost of the financing, but also to keep them in their home as long as it is viable.Make it easy for groups to buy together and trade equity between them. With our extended adolescence, it should be much less work for groups of friends to club together to build than it is right now. And the scale of their expenditure on rents should make mortgages eminently viable, were it not for the barrier of the big deposit.

Options for Everyone

Combining a tailored approach to construction, low-friction operations, distributed manufacturing and the utilisation of small plots, it should be possible to open up home ownership to a much larger group of people. People with the cashflow to fund it but who are priced out by the lack of supply and the scale of the up front investment. This should be an ideal investment opportunity for those seeking long term returns. And there is an enormous market to address, with people hungry for alternatives.

Ten ways to disrupt tomorrow

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the enormous RESI 2017 residential property conference, sharing a stage with the housing minister Alok Sharma, the BBC’s Mark Easton, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, and Blur’s Alex James.I wrote a talk for the event, but the night before I decided it was all wrong. Closing keynotes need to be full of energy — especially when people are still jaded from the previous night’s gala dinner. They need to give people some simple points to take away. And while they can summarise, the last thing people want to hear is a repeat of what has come before.Looking at the agenda for the previous days I decided I needed to come up with something fresh. This is what I wrote. Though it was written for a property audience, I think it has wider relevance. Have a read and see what you think.####I’ve been asked to talk to you today about disruption. In the next twenty five minutes I want to talk about ten things that are going to completely disrupt the physical world. Your business, your home, and everyone’s lives.But first I want to talk about what’s driving that disruption. Right here, right now there is one change driver that is bigger than Trump, bigger than Brexit, bigger than climate change. And it’s technology.Technology is driving change both more consistently and more persistently than any of these factors today. You may be able to roll back whatever decisions a politician makes, given enough time. But you can’t un-invent the smartphone, or the atom bomb — unfortunately, given the sabre rattling from a certain chubby dictator.

The appliance of science

When I talk about technology, I’m not talking about the phone in your pocket, though that’s part of it. I’m talking about technology in the broadest sense. The appliance of science. We are a race of tool makers who have been applying science since the first caveman or woman picked up a rock and realised it was a more efficient way to stove in the head of whatever animal they were trying to catch. Technology is maths, wheels and language. Which I guess makes Shakespeare a coder.Throughout our history technology has done one thing. It has lowered friction. Technology allows us to do things we couldn’t otherwise do more efficiently, quickly, and painlessly.But that gives whoever has that technology a competitive edge. Because if someone else has that edge, then we want it. It doesn’t matter if it’s countries competing in an arms race, companies competing in a market, or you trying to keep up with the family at number 42 with the nice new Merc.It is this competitive tension that keeps driving technology forward. The last ten years have seen technology transform our world. The next ten will see transformations of even greater magnitude.

1. The end of possessions

Technology has eliminated so much of the matter in our lives. Newspapers and magazines, books, paper in general. CDs, DVDs, Blurays and all the various paraphernalia needed to play them on.This has coincided with a shift to a much more experience-led culture. Expenditure on food and drink and holidays is up. People are focused on what they can do, not what they can own.There’s still huge — perhaps increasing — value in tactile experiences like vinyl, in the face of mass digitisation. But the larger trend is clear: we can achieve the same or greater experiences through fewer physical objects.

2. Personal AI

We outsource memory to other people in our lives. How many times have you relied on a partner or family member to remember someone’s birthday, the MOT, or home insurance renewal? Why shouldn’t we outsource to machines as well?The reality is that we already do. GPS has become our sense of direction, calendars and photos our memories.The next step is letting them filter the world, and even take buying decisions, on our behalf. Right now we put this power in the hands of third parties like Facebook, and subscription shopping services. When it should be our own personal AI, intimately familiar with our preferences and insulated from the influence of external parties.

3. Frictionless administration

With a personal AI hosting aspects of our identity, finance and vital documentation, we can look forward to truly frictionless administration. No more endless reams of paper or multi-page forms for every insurance policy, remortgage or investment. Our assistants interact with the APIs of any intermediary, in turn interacting with providers and third parties. Blockchain may play a role in providing a more secure and transparent record.

4. Everything is smart

Our personal AIs will be driven by data captured from the world around us, and able to shape that world to our needs. Because everything will be connected. It costs less than a couple of pounds to add WiFi to anything these days — a few cents to do it at scale. Eventually the cost of doing so falls below the return — however slight it might be. And so everything gets some level of smarts, for sensing or control.

5. Distributed energy

We can power this smarter world because three things are happening. First, the consumption of each unit is declining: desktop PCs consume around 400 watts, laptops 75w, tablets and phones just 10. Appliances get more efficient all the time.Second, our ability to generate electricity cheaply and cleanly is improving — particularly at small scale with solar. Wind is already markedly cheaper than nuclear, as the last round of bidding for UK energy supply shows.Third, we can now store energy better. The next generation of batteries approach the energy density of petrol and are made from cheap and readily-available minerals.

6. Everything is electric

Because of this, gas starts to look as unattractive as a home fuel as coal does to us now. Dangerous and dirty, people will bother less and less with installing gas supply in new developments, as electricity becomes the preferred technology for heating and cooking, transport and travel, as well as all of our digital appliances.

7. Autonomous construction

Machines can already lay bricks and pour concrete faster than people, with large-scale 3D printers now producing whole buildings near-autonomously from a recycled slurry. As this technology advances it will change the nature of construction and maintenance. Autonomous machines will follow digital instructions to create and complete whole structures, utilising new materials and modular techniques.Then machines will respond to sensor data to adapt those buildings to current need, within the parameters laid down by the original architects.

8. Dynamic addressing

Your phone is increasingly your address, enabling you to share your location with a high degree of accuracy with third parties. The incredible WhatThreeWords gives a unique address to every few square metres of the earth. Given these capabilities, why do we have everything delivered to a fixed physical address? New fraud controls mean we should be less reliant on address as a validation of someone’s trustworthiness. Why not send goods to wherever they want them — whether that’s where they are or where they will be?

9. Life through a lens

Yesterday’s Deloitte figures showed we spend an incredible amount of time staring at a screen. Tomorrow we will stare through it. Augmented reality enables more natural, human interactions with the digital world, and equips us with a general purpose sensor — the head-mounted camera — that enables a whole range of applications. I genuinely believe that in just ten years we will spend 10–12 hours per day in augmented reality, witnessing the world through a digital overlay. One that expands our senses, enhances our memory and cognition, and personalises our world. This isn’t a vision without risk, but I think it’s realistic.

10. Joy is paramount

One of the insights about the ‘millennial’ generation that I actually accept is the rising priority placed on experiences over possessions. While widely pilloried I think this can only be seen as a good thing in retrospect. We should enjoy life if we can, and our spaces and places, services and service, need to be shaped around that priority.