Where is my space age? – A Guest Blog by Graham Barnfield

One irony of NASA is that its supporters sometimes rely on the banalities of the present to defend earlier space programme expenditure. Asked to justify the huge costs, the invention of materials such as Teflon – lining many a non-stick pan – is trotted out. Treating NASA as a supplier of kitchen equipment makes little sense, not least because it is factually wrong. The NASA website explains the confusion that led to the emergence of this urban myth. As a child of the 1960s – well, November 1969 – it always disappoints me to hear the Final Frontier being dragged into the home. Such attitudes make a manned colony on Mars only slightly more likely than a President Gingrich next year.

Space travel’s in my blood, sang The Only Ones, but in public debate space travel has too often been made to sound domesticated. Yet as Davin Heckman’s book A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day  shows us, the space age home is also an idea in retreat. One of the peculiarities of a trip to a Disneyland theme park is that the future – which Walt showcased in areas called “Tomorrowland” – could look dated rather quickly. Since the first one opened in 1955, regular revamps are a big part of Tomorrowland’s history. In 1980, Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort had another shot at the future, by making a clear distinction between its Disneyland-style Magic Kingdom and the neighbouring EPCOT Center – the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Heckman is alert to this; according to his (sometimes sprawling) argument, from the 1950s the growing love affair with space age domestic bliss helped to redefine the idea of the US home.

Coinciding with Disney’s speculations about the future was a subtle shift – again, identified by Heckman – from seeing labour-saving devices as a good thing for increasing leisure time, to seeing them as a basic necessity. As the book closes, the author starts treating too much technology as a bad thing, dehumanizing us even as it saves our precious minutes. The politics of the book could prove controversial – it seems that the equipment being discussed could end up controlling us, installing a policeman inside our head under the guise of increasing our control. Enter the Matrix.

From Disney to Dixons adverts, it is clear that the technologies under fire here could prompt us to redefine ourselves in the most narrowly consumerist terms. Yet this analysis is one-sided: what of the 1950s housewife, a portion of whose day was freed up by the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and refrigeration? Indeed, what of the decline of domestic service, which allowed a significant slice of the US-UK workforce to find more productive and more lucrative forms of employment? Stressing the promise of a truly smart home may have made what Heckman sees as trivial concerns become frighteningly important, but for millions of people, the alternative would be worse. It may be disquieting to compare the time the average American spends organizing their sitcom viewing to the priorities of his or her counterpart in Sudan, but this could also be used as an argument for modernsing Sudanese domestic arrangements along US lines.

Heckman’s style – sometimes furious, sometimes scatterbrained – is an acquired taste, but there is plenty of food for thought here. What he seems uneasy with is an account of the other side of the ‘Dream’ – just how disappointed we have become with these promised developments. One major tension is with A Small World treating smart home technology as potentially totalitarian – think of Hal in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, only in your house (and head) – and its real history of falling short on its promises. You know the argument for the Space Race is being lost when people start talking about Teflon pots and pans; likewise, when the space-age home – or even the humble labour-saving gadget – is portrayed as sinister, it seems that our aspirations are getting lower.

Too often today smart homes are seen as a chance to minimize human impact. Consider, for instance, the Passivhaus. Since 1991 this building standard has adopted the principles of a well-sealed and highly insulated envelope, resulting in 90 percent energy savings in those which have been constructed (primarily in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). While the tech is unobjectionable – bring on triple glazing! – the role reversal here is striking. Housing that once sheltered people from the outside world is repurposed to protect the environment from the people in the housing.

Even the quest for an electronic ‘Holy Grail’ is now framed in ways that combine home safety and disappointment. Consumers and companies would love a single ‘black box’ that handles all our telecom and entertainment needs, with broadband internet coming in and the various networked services distributed to all members of a household. Yes, there are sensible precautions one should take in this wireless ‘small world’, to prevent one getting ripped off (see e.g. Justin Doo, ‘Safety in the Wi-Fi Home’, Property Weekly, 23 January 2008, pp.90-91). But the cultural narrative about wi-fi theft seems to grow in inverse proportion to our expectations that a single device can revolutionize our lives. Sorry Microsoft, but the X-Box 360 just doesn’t cut it right now. Instead, the limited impact of home entertainment represents a scaling down of the old promises made about robotics, AI and virtual reality. Westerners may love their smartphones, but delivery of the really big promises remains elusive. Contra Heckman, let’s build homes that are smarter than any phone.

Davin Heckman, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day is available now from Duke University Press

About the author:

Graham Barnfield works at SAE Institute Belgrade. He is a Fellow of the Wolfsonian-FIU and an associate of the London East Research Institute.