Smart Living of the Future

Degree of Owned Consumer Product: Will people in 2041 continue to own most of the products they use in their daily lives, or will they prefer to rent or share them flexibly? The share of privately held consumer products by individuals depends on many factors such as the cultural values of a society and existing business models on the market. While the “high ownership” scenario represents the status quo to a large extent, the “low ownership” scenario is an emerging and thus a more complex one. Low ownership not only implies sharing products but can also entail using products via a subscription model, depending on the type of product, the use case, or the frequency of usage. Finally, both scenarios have very different implications for the sustainable production and consumption of consumer products.

Interoperability of Devices and Ecosystems: Interoperability between ecosystems refers to the connectivity of devices from different brands that interact with each other using shared resources and interfaces. Regardless of the regulations concerning data exchange between organizations, a company’s choice to share its data, and access to its platform is the basic requirement to connect ecosystems from different providers. This could have a big impact on the Smart Living Industry as the core functionality of Smart Living is for various devices to be connected and provide personalized assistance. Since connectivity plays such a significant role, the extent of interoperability would affect the research and development of smart living technologies. More extensive interoperability will widen the scope for development, whereas limited interoperability could dampen the speed of development.

Garden of Eden: Most consumer products are not owned anymore, they are rather exchanged through sharing platforms or subscribed to as a Product-as-a-service. Device manufacturers put high emphasis on perfect integration within their own ecosystem but do not facilitate any interoperability with third-party devices.

On-Demand Convenience: Widespread adoption of technology standards enables interoperability of devices from competitors. To increase utilization, current legislation has enabled sharing and subscription as the predominant form of device usage.

My HomeOS: Sharing models have not become a widespread success: people value individuality and ownership of their consumer products. As a result of open standards, these devices from various manufacturers are able to communicate with each other in one streamlined ecosystem.

Smart Home Islands: The widespread adoption of privately owned IoT devices with a lack of common standards leads to a fragmented IoT environment at home while device manufacturers focus on interoperability within their own ecosystem instead of facilitating the integration of other firms.