Brave new home: 2022 will be remembered for how it redefined the smart home
"In the living room the voice clock sang," reads the opening line of Ray Bradbury's seminal short story "There Will Come Soft Rains." At the time of its publication in 1950, the smart home was scarcely more than an idea, a narrative vehicle to explore a new-made, post-bomb reality. Yet in the ensuing decades, the idea of the smart home began to materialize, slowly at first, then with abandon, growing glass eyes, mesh skin and a plastic carapace, asserting its reality on an unprepared world in the form of smart speakers, TVs, lights, locks, doorbells, thermostats -- millions upon millions of devices.
2022 may well mark a final step toward incarnation for the smart home: Millions of people have been driven into their homes during the pandemic; millions more have begun building new homes according to the emergent needs of a world rewritten by COVID; average internet speeds can finally support connected homes, and those speeds will only continue to climb ; a new communication protocol might finally unite a historically siloed industry; and, perhaps most importantly, people are more tech-literate, more tech-interested and readier to live in smart homes than ever before.
Taken individually, each of these trends is intriguing. Taken collectively, they paint a vivid picture of the smart home growing ever more solid, more real. 2022 is a hinge year for the market, and the changes that happen in the next few months could come to define the industry for years.
