"I sometimes hate Google" - an empirical study of non-experts' experiences with smart home technologies and digital housework

The smart home has captured the imagination of the public, governments, organizations, and commercial companies for many years. Imaginaries presented in industry visions often promote a “set them and forget them” experience where smart home devices seamlessly assist in or perform everyday tasks to make our daily lives run more smoothly (Hargreaves & Wilson, 2013). Emphasizing comfort, leisure, and pleasance, the smart technology itself is depicted as simple, effortless, and invisible (Martinussen, 2013; Strengers & Nicholls, 2018). However, recent research challenges these ideas. There have been identified several activities involved in managing the smart home, often referred to as digital housekeeping, highlighting how this labour relates to control and is skewed among household members and between genders (Aagaard, 2022; Kennedy et al, 2015). The control of such technology is often concentrated in one person within the household, the (often male) ‘expert’, and although smart devices have the possibility of altering the traditionally gendered housework, they may also perpetuate it (Aagaard, 2022; Aagaard & Madsen, 2022; Nicholls & Strengers, 2018). However, so far there has been paid little attention to those who do not consider themselves experts and are not in control of the technology – here referred to as ‘non-experts’. Although they are not responsible for the technology, it does not mean that they do not engage in labour related to them. Moreover, with varying degrees of competencies and confidence with such technologies, they are at risk of feeling alienated and out of control of their home environments. Applying theories of practice, this paper draws upon qualitative fieldwork in ten Norwegian households with smart home technologies to investigate what labour goes into the connected home and how it affects the non-experts of the household.