Taking Matter(s) into your own hands

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TAKING MATTER(S) INTO YOUR OWN HANDS

At a glance, Matter’s ambition is to achieve interoperability between smart home devices, regardless of the manufacturer, so in an ideal, utopian scenario, you can ask your Amazon Alexa to switch on your Philips Hue lightbulb without the push of a button. But scratch the surface, and you’ll find a network of companies working together under one unified purpose: to realise the smart home of the future. Because the standard has grown to include other device types, like smart lighting, which is a popular format, as well as microwave ovens and electric vehicle charging support, more scenarios have become possible, and the possibility of a fully automated smart home has grown even closer. This is what the Matter standard is actively working towards. The concept of the smart home wasn’t conceived at the release of the Matter standard, in 2021. Discourse about what smart homes would look like, the benefits they would bring, and even whether they represented a fundamental yielding of autonomy from humans to machines – and subsequent social anxiety about the role technology would play in our lives (see Figure 1) – goes back several years. For brevity, the focus

of this article will be on how the introduction of Matter has facilitated significant growth and development in smart homes, as well as shaped the understanding of what a smart home looks like – with brief mention to the notion of an ‘autonomous home’ representing a further evolution. In order to understand how Matter has supported, and is supporting the smart home, it helps to contextualise it by looking at the history of the smart home to begin with. Conversations around smart homes have been happening for decades, but without a unifying standard, what a smart home meant rested less on unified communications between devices, and more on how installing these devices, such as smart lighting or smart locks, were providing new functionalities such as energy management, greater convenience, and safety. Smart home devices were bought from different brands, with no interoperability, and although there was evident interest for how smart homes could help with energy management [1], in hindsight, growth was hindered. A survey conducted in 2016 [1] on the benefits and risks of smart home technologies (‘SHTs’) not only demonstrated that smart homes were a “priority area” for energy