Georgia Tech’s 2000 Aware Home prototype embedded context-aware sensors in a house.

Evidence

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 28

Categorization

• XREF: The Aware Home is an early physical prototype of the ambient/environmental sensing that surveillance capitalism later industrialized—connects to Weiser’s ubiquitous computing and Mark Weiser’s vision. — connects to: Physical space is being redesigned as browse-able environments of sensor data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 647; Battery-free smart skin enables perpetual, inconspicuous ambient surveillance networks — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 753; Smart-home IoT devices enroll consumers in surveillance-based markets without knowledge or consent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 751 (+3 more)
• SEED: A piece on how benevolent ‘living laboratory’ research (Aware Home, Smart House) seeded the very data-extraction infrastructure now criticized as surveillance—the road from sensor-enabled home care to behavioral surplus.

Broader Connections

• Smart-home IoT devices enroll consumers in surveillance-based markets without knowledge or consent #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 751
• Smart-home devices now create immense knowledge stores with unowned power #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 31