Homes: Upcoming Trends

The home of most value in the future will not use technology primarily to automatically control the environment. It will help its occupants learn how to control the environment on their own.

People spend more time in their homes than in any other space. The home ideally provides a safe, comfortable environment in which to relax, communicate, learn, and be entertained. Increasingly, it is where people connect with friends and family, conduct supplementary business, manage resources, learn about the world, and maintain health and autonomy as they age. People invest extraordinary amounts of time, money, and emotional energy to mold their homes into living spaces that meet their needs.

Unfortunately, homes today are ill suited to exploiting the pervasive computing applications being developed in laboratories. Most homes do not easily accommodate even the simplest new technologies, let alone embedded sensor infrastructures and ubiquitous display technologies. Perhaps, homeowners generally believe that computer devices make life more complex and frustrating rather than easier and more relaxing. They are wary of the aesthetic, financial, and cognitive challenges of bringing new technologies into their homes.

If we are to believe most movies, television, and popular press articles that mention home life in the future, we will have complete control over our spaces at the touch of a button. In fact, our homes will be so fully automated and “smart” that we will rarely have to think about everyday tasks at all. We will spend nearly all our time in the home engaged in leisure activities because digital and robotic agents will have taken over the mundane chores of day-to-day life.

Technology will require human effort in ways that keep life as mentally and physically challenging as possible as people age. Environments shall be created that help people live long and healthy lives in their homes; reduce resource consumption and integrate learning into their everyday activity in the home

Computer technology shall be ever-present but in a more subtle way. Information will be presented to people at precisely the time and place they need it. The pervasive technologies to empower people with information will help people make decisions; they will not be stripped of their sense of control as psychologically and physically debilitating.

There will be an environment that uses pervasive computing technology to save energy by automatically controlling the heater-vent-air conditioning system. The environment’s embedded sensors will infer context such as where people are, what they are doing, and what the inside environmental conditions are. The home will contain computer-controlled appliances, windows, and blinds.

To reduce resource consumption homes will be designed that control environmental conditions. The home’s occupant will inform the system via some type of user interface that he or she wishes to stay comfortable while saving as much energy or money as possible. The home will then use a set of optimization algorithms to simultaneously maximize savings and comfort by automatically controlling the systems, windows, and blinds. For instance, on a day when the temperature is predicted to shift from warm to cool, the home might determine that the optimal cooling strategy is to shut down the AC and automatically open a set of blinds and windows so as to create an efficient cross breeze.

There appear to be many situations in which the automatic system might succeed in optimizing temperature comfort yet fail in “doing the right thing”: something noisy is occurring outside, someone is smoking outside the window, someone in the home is allergic to pollen and the pollen count is high, it is raining outside, it is too quiet for a person reading when the hum of the air conditioner is off, someone did not want the blinds open because it throws glare on a computer screen, and so on. No matter how hard the system designer tries to program contingency plans for all possible contexts, invariably the system will sometimes frustrate the home occupant and perform in unexpected and undesirable ways.

In the home of the future, the windows include a tiny light that is either embedded in the window frame (for example, a light-emitting diode) or projected on the window using display technology (for example, an IBM Everywhere Display). The home’s embedded sensors and optimization algorithms compute a strategy for cooling the home by opening a particular set of windows, but they do not proactively implement the strategy.

Imagine that the light on the window subtly illuminates. It does not interrupt the home occupant. When someone in the home notices it, he or she knows the light means “it might be a good idea to open this window right now.” The home thereby unobtrusively informs the user of actions that might be taken to conserve energy or money. In this way, the home teaches the occupant, in an unobtrusive way, how to achieve the optimal settings. The home can take a similar approach when the goal is to improve health or introduce learning into everyday life.

The labor and material cost ratio is irrational today. This will be altered in making future homes. More money shall be devoted to materials, design, engineering, safety, and technologies in the home. Borrowing from recent innovations in the automobile industry, an integrated “chassis–infill” construction system shall be developed capable of rapidly installing with minimal labor. In one integrated assembly, composite beams and columns provide structure, insulation, sensor arrays, lighting, signal and power cable raceways, and ductwork. The beams use special connectors that lock together easily. Infill sections that form the structure’s interior and exterior walls are then “snapped in” to the chassis structure without requiring skilled labor. Finally, interior finishes are snapped on to cover joints and wiring raceways.

The resulting structure will be easier to change than conventional housing, require less expensive labor during construction, allow more money to be spent on higher-quality materials and technologies, and easily accommodate sensing infrastructure and new output technologies. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Film Production in coming days

In a world of flickering screens, large and small, filmmakers will work inside and outside of the studios and television networks, bring in diverse voices to televisions, cinemas, and computers alike, tell stories ruled not by profit but by art, by conviction, and by people’s need to connect to one another and the world around them. In the same world ignoramus filmmakers of Pakistan—clueless about the modern technologies, the art and science of filmmaking together with the oddments of globalization—will drag on poking holes in technological jumps and thus demonstrating that they were powerless to draw breath in the 21st Century.

Future’s digital technology will transform the way the media is made and consumed. The moment is not far off when critical decisions will be made, in the halls of government and in the marketplace, about how digital technology will be used to create, copy, distribute, and present media in the years to come.

As digital opportunities and challenges change our landscape, one question will stand out: how will the public—and the diversity that filmmakers bring to it—benefit? Filmmakers will depend on a healthy public media ecosystem, and our shared future tied to policy that nurture or weaken that system. They will take creative risks, speak their minds, and champion the many voices that matter most but seldom heard.

For future’s media makers, the essence of digital is this: everything we do to create content can be turned into a series of ones and zeros that our naked eyes can’t decode into pictures and sounds, but that a variety of devices can.

This new digital code will change media making forever. This code will transform the four most important processes for media makers—production, replication, distribution, and presentation.

To produce media, future’s artist will be able to point a digital video camera at a tall mustachioed man scratching his ear and capture this moving image, represented inside the camera as a unique piece of digital code. The artist will manipulate that code to remove the man’s mustache and add a large and hungry dinosaur bearing down behind him (using CGI technology). The artist will then combine this new code with other pieces of code to shape a complex story of images, sound and music (using editing systems such as Avid or Final Cut Pro).

The result will be an enormous sequence of finished code: a movie, say, that will be copied an unlimited number of times, with each copy an exact replica of the original. Any of these copies will then be transmitted through the air, across wires or via a physical container (such as a CD), depending on how large the code is and how much capacity the transmitter has read at the receiving end in many different ways by a wide variety of devices—a computer, a projector, a television, a phone—that translate the code into images and sound.

The possibilities with digital technology will be nearly infinite. The realities will be much more confined. The question with digital will not be what might happen, but what filmmakers actually do with it.

The dizzying pace of digital change will, in fact, catch us all somewhat by surprise. Businesses and lawmakers will scramble to catch up with the changes wrought by this technological explosion. New business models and new policies will be built to deal with it.

Major economic stakeholders in tomorrow’s burgeoning media economy will all work hard to shape the outcome in their own interests. And much will be at stake for them all, because digital technology will challenge the traditional business models that media companies have relied on to profit financially from their work.

But they will not be the only stakeholders. There will also be public—all of us as citizens and parents and children, artists and consumers. When the dust will settle on the new digital economy and society, how will the public have benefited? Will the media policies actually promote freedom of speech and diversity of expression? Will they foster the many facets of the cultures that make up a nation?

The good news is that digital technology will make production cheaper, faster, and more manageable. It will also open up avenues for distribution, such as the Internet and, to a lesser extent, cable and satellite, while drastically reducing the costs of replicating copies of an filmmaker’s work.

And that’s also the bad news. Filmmakers will face challenges in three big areas: ownership, distribution, and funding. Specifically: (1) Ownership: How will filmmakers protect their work from unauthorized use and copying, while still having access to others’ work for legitimate use in their own creations? (2) Distribution: Will new distribution networks give filmmakers more or less access to audiences—and how will that distribution affect production? (3) Public support: How will the public resources now provided—such as spectrum allotments and public funding—change in the digital era?

In the days and age of democracy, stakeholders will assert their interests in the coming changes. Broadcasters, movie studios, technology companies, and other players will try to figure out how to make sure that the answers to these questions benefit them. They will take their issues to legislators, to the courts, and to consumers. The result will be policy.

Filmmakers will also be stakeholders—as well as artists and business people with a job to do. Digitization won’t change everything. The old standbys of good storytelling, the battles over concentrated ownership, the resistance to change by those with power, and conflicts over public support will repeat themselves in the digital age.

Digital will change the ecosystem that the filmmakers live in. The vision that filmmakers bring will be important, as stakeholders thrash out the terms under which they use digital code. Cut and dried, this future has already made an entrance in Hollywood. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation