Tom Coates lives in a house that tweets. “Hey @tomcoates, I just noticed some movement in the sitting room. Is that you?” it posts to @houseofcoates when a motion sensor is activated in the British designer’s San Francisco home.
It’s not the sort of giant leap forward in technology that would have got Steve Jobs donning his polo neck for a big announcement. But, sometimes, it’s the quiet developments that creep up on us that end up changing our lives.
Coates, co-founder of a yet-to-launch start-up called Product Club, spent a few hundred dollars on Amazon to create a simple system that allows his house to tweet to him when certain “smart” devices are used. He likens its quotidian updates – about the temperature, lights switching on or whether his plant needs watering – to posts from a friend abroad. “You don’t care about everything they’re doing but it’s nice to have a sense that they are there,” he says, noting that it also functions as a cheap burglar alarm.