What’s "Uninvited Guests"?
Uninvited Guests is a speculative design short film that explores how people might live with increasingly autonomous smart devices in the home. Created by Superflux in 2015 for the ThingTank research project, it follows an older man navigating connected health technologies sent by his family. Through design fiction the project surfaces and examines the tension between assistive technologies and the dignity and autonomy of the people they are designed to support.
Who is it for?
This project is aimed at designers, technologists, and researchers interested in the social implications of the Internet of Things (often known as IoT or smart) devices. It is particularly interested in Internet of Things devices that offer remote monitoring as a proposed solution for improving peoples' health. It is relevant for people who make decisions about building, using, or making decisions to do with these technologies, this could include the people who will use such devices, carers or care providers, health policy professionals, and innovation teams exploring assistive technologies. It seeks to offer a human-centred lens on assistive technologies that use remote monitoring.
Approach
The project employed speculative design and design fiction to show a future connected home. The team developed thematic scenarios around autonomy and individuals choices to resist technology, focusing on elderly care in particular. The scenarios were translated into a filmed story centred on an elderly character interacting with imagined “smart objects” that symbolise future technologies. The devices are deliberately depicted in the film as bright yellow to highlight that in this story they are provocations rather than real. However, the objective is to highlight the real complexities of living with such technologies.
Contribution
The project demonstrates tensions between care, control, and independence in technology-mediated homes. It reveals how smart objects influence everyday routines and how users may choose to resist or reinterpret their intended roles. The work also contributes to emerging ideas about "thing-centred" perspectives, asking designers of technology to not just consider the overall goal that their design is trying to solve, but also the perspective of the designed object and the people who it might impact.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This project exemplifies how speculative design makes emerging technologies tangible and open to critique.
It highlights the value of narrative, speculation, and making things like the short film that can communicate complicated social and technology stories in easy-to-interpret forms that can encourage discussion.
The images show the character in the film choosing to have two plates of food in response to a fork which monitors his food intake. He uses the smart fork to move the healthy food around on the plate, while he enjoys a rather less healthy meal using a fork that does not monitor what he is eating.
Rather than presenting smart homes as purely beneficial, it reveals the complexities of living with systems that monitor and influence everyday life.