Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.
~ Make magazine 2006 ‘The Maker’s Bill of Rights’

DTS HOME AUTOMATION

OWNER’S STATEMENT

I first discovered KNX accidentally during the Christmas season in 2012. My wife and I were attending a lavish party at a very grand spec house in Santa Monica, California, hosted by the Sony Corporation for customers who were members of their “Sony Cierge” program. The party was amazing. Especially because they had John Legend, one of our favorite musicians, perform live in the back yard!
Sony was showing off a very large, new TV screen. It was almost 90”.
The house was outfitted with a very impressive home automation system and we were invited to take a tour.
On one wall of the house, I spotted a beautiful glowing X-shaped light mounted on the wall in the master bedroom.
It looked a bit like this:

I boldly touched various parts of it, but nothing happened. After asking around, I learned that it was a keypad that controlled the lights, shades and sound in the room, but that it was locked out because of prying fingers like mine.

I also learned that the foreign and mysterious technology I had discovered was called “KNX’ and that it was, in fact, truly “foreign”.

I soon learned that KNX stands for “Konnex”, a networking system and protocol that are very common everywhere in the world, except in the USA, for low voltage control of both residential and commercial lighting, climate, audio-video and many other environmental management systems.

This turns out to be a very similar situation to the use of the Metric versus Imperial measurement systems, where the USA is “the odd man out” internationally.

After doing months of research, I became enamored with KNX for two fundamental reasons:

1. KNX was a true internationally accepted home automation standard, while in the USA there was none. Every manufacturer in the home automation business in the USA develops and sells their own proprietary technology. As a big believer in the use of standards, I became very motivated to see if I could adopt that technology for use in the home I was planning to build.
2. Many of the KNX products were visually beautiful and seemed to be manufactured with very high-quality materials and manufacturing processes.

Initially, I looked for companies that might be selling and supporting KNX systems for residential use locally. There were only two. One was the company that had done the installation described above and neither one of them had completed a sufficient number of projects that resulted in compelling me to move forward with them.

Over the next few years, however, I began to see a small variety of European and Scandinavian companies, such as Basalte, appearing and exhibiting at the annual trade show for the USA home automation business, called CEDIA.

Before too long, I became acquainted with a sufficiently experienced and solid company called DMC Technology that was actively committed to bringing the KNX technology to the USA and, luckily for me, they are headquartered nearby in Los Angeles.

The path was now clear for me to incorporate the widely used and standards based KNX technology without the fear of being left without ongoing support or being the sole customer using it.

Ultimately, my wife, our architect and I decided to employ KNX to control these specific systems in the DTS Project House:

1. Lighting.
2. Shades and draperies.
3. Motorized Sliding doors.
4. Skylights.

MILLS STUDIO’S STATEMENT

What does home automation have to do with making architecture? Usually very little. Home automation is usually considered another technical input that the building must account for, but home automation does not meaningfully contribute to the architectural aesthetic nor the architectural experience. If home automation does contribute to a home’s aesthetic it is more often than not a negative contribution of ill placed screens, keypads, and cords. The visuals of home automation intrude on the architecture and simple tasks are made more complicated. The home automation tends toward the installer’s and Owner’s personal preferences for solving technical concerns with little expression of more general propositions of how technology should and should not integrate into daily life or enhance the architectural experience.     

Home Automation has the definite ability to improve a building’s convenience and efficiency and contributes to its inhabitant’s safety and security in a myriad of ways. Can and should home automation meaningfully contribute to an architectural aesthetic and the architectural experience? Is there an analogous way home automation can or should shape a home’s experience like an automobile’s monitoring and automation systems affect the driving experience?  Or can and should home automation only remain a discrete set of hardware and software responses to technical prompts? If home automation is to be employed, it must further architectural art.    

As with every element included in a building, home automation must make the architecture more significant. Home automation can contribute to significant architecture by fulfilling at least three of mills studio’s architectural intentions: make architecture dynamic and performative;  integrate daily life with the natural-world by defining the relationship between nature and culture; and organize complexity. Fulfilling these three intentions leads directly to aesthetic expressions that home automation make possible and responsible. A house integrating home automation in a considered way looks different and provides more dynamic aesthetic and architectural experiences than a house that does not.

Intention One –

Home automation makes it possible to reconfigure space and adjust atmosphere easily and instantly by automating building and architectural elements, such as doors, windows, skylights, shades, screens, and lighting, in ways that can create a dynamic architectural aesthetic and spatial experience. Home automation allows a building to responsibly change and adjust to both environmental and cultural inputs – to “perform” as a living organism. This is critical if architecture is to be sustainable both environmentally and culturally.

Software design is how the inhabitants determine how much or little of the building’s performance is automated and how much is directly controlled, and how much of the performance is predetermined and how much is random. Significant home automation allows for both control and surprise and thus a more dynamic aesthetic and spatial experience. The visual impact of what home automation automates should always be more significantly impactful than the visual impact of the home automation devices. The building can have many of the performance aspects of a machine for living but does not have to have the alienating visual character of a machine.           

Intention Two –

Home automation has the ability to connect everyday living more directly to the natural world and natural phenomena, and in turn express the proper relationship between man and nature. This is critical to architecture making us a part of something bigger and defining a significant place for man in the world.  Home automation allows us to alter important physical architectural elements in response to inputs from the natural world making us more aware of our circumstances. It is possible to responsibly integrate nature and natural phenomena into the architectural aesthetic and spatial experience. Home automation can contribute to more heightened and more frequent direct experience of weather, wind, rain, sunlight, shade, and shadows so that the natural world is interwoven with the manmade for a more dynamic daily life. Architecture along with home automation has the potential to make us aware of the most primal aspects of existence on earth: air, water, fire, and light.

Implementing the home automation forces decisions about how much and what parts of nature man controls, and how much of this control is directed and how much is random. We have to make decisions about whether mathematics, such as algorithms, or aesthetics drive the protocols for automation. We also have to consider if mathematics is a natural phenomenon or manmade, and if mathematics are themselves aesthetic.

One question that must be asked is what is lost when relieving us of physically responding to natural inputs, such as closing the door when it is going to rain, with automatic responses.  What is lost with home automation? We should be skeptical of the portions of home automation that only supposedly make life easier. Home automation should be designed to do what inhabitants cannot do – process multiple inputs instantly. Significantly designed home automation gives us the opportunity to determine the proper and desired relationship between the natural and cultural worlds. So, does making contemplative decisions about our relationship with nature in order to design home automation actually give us a deeper relationship with nature than requiring immediate decisions and action each time it rains?

Intention Three –

Home automation can organize complexity in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of the individual parts. Home automation can generate complex dynamic systems and structures from the interaction of simple elementary parts, thus creating integrated and immersive environments and experiences. These interactions can be both random and controlled, the result of both chance and pattern. Home automation makes more complex structures possible through reconciling more inputs at faster speeds than human beings can process.  

But whether the precise behaviors of the parts and the emerging results are predicted, the parameters that define the interactions are designed – a man-made algorithm. Thus, the most important decisions regarding home automation are determining which parts are to contribute to the system, which inputs will affect the part’s behaviors, and what protocols govern the interactions of the parts. The buildings inhabitants, or more precisely the automation designers, are thus always ultimately in control of how random or controlled, how organized the complexity is. Home automation does not reduce human intervention, but changes when and how we intervene. Every individual circumstance no longer requires our input as we have defined our input  – our proper and desired relationship to the world – through home automation.

Home Automation entails four areas of technical decision making and design: what will be automated and controlled; what hardware and software will be used to automate and control; how will hardware and software be configured; how will building users interface with the system. Each aspect requires a consideration of larger issues to assure that that intentions, implementation, and results are aligned. Of special significance is how users interface with home automation as all other aspects of home automation are superfluous if the inhabitants do not or cannot use the home automation.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
~ Douglas Adams