When the fire alarm and the doorbell alert you at the same time…

Designing a P2K experience for the Digital home

To make my blog a Friday casual thing indeed, bringing in a new routine…

Three posts that deeply touched me:

1. All the returns in life
2. I am a teacher, and I am about to quit
3. Just-in-time learning

First things first, I am not promoting anything or anyone. In the age of virtual relationships and fake memes, reaching out to people and sharing an appreciation is the least I can do. Nevertheless, these three articles strongly resonate with some of my thoughts/practises,/beliefs.

Three odd news items that hit me:

1. Shakira and the boars — Maybe the handbag hide belonged to its ancestors?
2. An extra ten days off for school kids — Bless this advisor who has come out with such a brilliant idea
3. Learning BAME History — That’s an excellent step, not because I am an Asian, but that will hopefully open up good debates to learn from our past

Now moving on to my Friday write-up:

All strategies tend to have a section on future trends and how the world could be in 5 years. It is a mandatory section in most strategic works I have seen. It is customary to have that section — Usually, it brings a bit of wow factor into the strategic narrative and carries on to a ‘do-nothing’ option or a digital transformation plan! However, some organisations actually peek into the future but are good at bringing it into the near term and understanding the effects on their company operations.

This week, I was thinking about some futuristic digital experiences for the home environment. Here, I want to share some real near-term opportunities within a home environment, in the context of a futuristic digital home and some more here.

Reference: https://technofaq.org/posts/2019/05/the-future-of-your-smart-home/

The biggest challenge I see with myself and my wider family is that we are into devices a lot. Not to mention the increasing virtual learning model.

A few days back at a friends place, our friend was demonstrating smart lights, smart doorbell, smart video entry, smart alarms that spoke. However, while we were enjoying the dinner, the warm air from the roti rose, and the smart alarm informed us about the possibility of fire.

One of our friends were at the doorstep, and the smart video entry started telling us about a potential visitor at the door. We were confused as the fire alarm and entry system both informing us in parallel, “Alert, a potential visitor on fire! please open the wind on the visitor and doors to let them out.”

Later after dinner, we were scanning our screen time reports. We felt that over the years, our screen time has tremendously increased by a considerable margin.

We started discussing the changes in lifestyle from the 80s/90s; households like mine had a strict TV time — nowadays, people have screen time limits (but almost, always flouted); the iPhone screen time controls are useless and not intuitive. Some parental screen time control apps are ok, but they are painful when configuring multiple combinations. In addition, we have a few many devices — the age of abundance problem: Kindles, cheap Tablets, Kids smartwatches, our smartwatches, home-hubs, photo frames and not to mention the iPhones and other ageing devices.

On one end, we are slowly moving into the future of e-waste — there is a business model here.

We continued to discuss that those days, we used to get papers delivered to the doorstep, and we used to go to buy groceries. Now stores deliver groceries to the doorstep, and the news’paper’ is delivered online to the Fridge!

In addition, some of my friends have quite a few online magazine subscriptions (free, part-free, paid) — their kids have some too.

Today B2C & B2B firms design their customer experience and journey management for seamless shopping — is there someone for the residential construction industry or home automation business listening here? Will we start seeing new types of houses where the digital lifestyle is a lot more seamless? There are many wireframed future versions of our lifestyle as videos, but when will that become real?

Assuming the Digital home vision is somewhere out there in 10–15 years, bringing it into the near future, can I have a simple connected home device experience in one place through a single device where I can manage everyday household activities?

1. Is there a standard widescreen tablet type device? (not X-box or PS5 or Surface Hub)
2. By devices/tablets, I actually mean to create a set of physical and virtual experiences combined for a resident.
3. That the family can have the collective experience of life
4. Read news, magazines in one place
5. Play games in one place
6. Online grocery orders
7. Check on the delivery status
8. Insurance, banking services through a single channel for partners
9. The most significant pain point I see here is in terms of photo/videos, documents sharing
10. experience is abysmal, sub-optimal and often resulting in sharing passwords
11. I have tried individually sorting this out by buying multiple odd devices to make it seamless and miserably failed
12. To do all of the above through a managed, safe and secure way

Most of these activities happen individually, or this is bottlenecked by someone else’s virtual user-id/password.

I strongly sense that there is a big value/market in creating a good home experience by leveraging existing products and creating some basic capabilities to making it work.

I would be keen to invest my time and efforts in developing a P2K (Partners 2 Kids) experience channel — is anyone listening? But, most importantly, I see an opportunity that homes can become cyber safe by creating something like this.

Alternatively, If you take this idea and make something out of it, just reference me — please do bring me into your first set of free-users to trial out ;)