-Tactics and Concepts for Highly Mobile People

inspired by extreme lifestyles, in this case the lifestyles of the wealthy, to learn about how
technology can support the way people are staged in their smart home.
Kortbek[13] has pointed to the relevance for HCI to look at staging with point of
departure from dramaturgy. She argues that we create staged environments when
designing interactive technologies. From dramaturgy, we learn that staging is the
preparations, including both planning and physical components, before a
performance[10]. The performance is the action itself where unpredictable things may
happen. In this case the performance is what takes place in the home and staging is the
interior design and the physical layout of technology, where inputs are planned to give a
specific output during the performance but also leaves room for unpredicted actions.
In the following we report an investigation of a segment not previously studied within
HCI. Through collaboration with a high-­‐end HI-­‐FI provider, we have had the chance to
visit 27 high-­‐end homes around the world and interview owners and families about their
motivations for building the homes and their experiences with living in these homes.
Based on this we report on qualities that have not been previously described in smart
home research. The example of the hall illustrates a tendency that we saw in most of our
interviews, where homes and smart home technology are often a site for exerting
personal power and staging oneself as well as exposing lifestyle and a successful life. We
suggest that these are important qualities for all of us to a greater or lesser extend even
though we have different resources to act them out. In order to establish successful smart
homes of the future we must understand the lived life, the motivations and aspirations
driving people and the role technology plays in this. This paper contributes to the
emerging research in this direction [19]. It is relevant to look at the lives of the wealthy as
they are to some extend extreme, but also because they have actually materialized some
of their dreams in their creation of their home. It is our goal to bring forward these
passions and experiences in this paper.
Related work
More than forty years ago the anthropologist Laura Nader [15] identified a field not yet
been studied: the cultures of the powerful elites. She defines studies of the culture of
affluence as studying up. Traditional HCI is mostly studying sideways[7], whereas there
are very few, if any, examples of studying up. Ljungblad et al [14] have pointed to the
potential of studying marginal practices to spark innovation, and Djajadiningrat et al [6]
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