1999 | The Year of Smart House

1999 was a pivotal year for home technologies and automation. This image shows the poster for Disney's Smart House, released in 1999. This movie tells the story of a father, son and daughter. They had recently lost their wife / mother, and the home is in disarray. There is no longer a maternal presence to perform the mental, emotional, and physical labors needed by the family. The son enters a contest to live in a new smart house that will provide for their every need. After winning the contest, the smart house does conduct most of the mental and physical work, but fails to provide for the family's emotional needs. The son modify's the house's programming to fill that role. The house soon builds into an overbearing figure that eventually traps the family in the home rather than let them leave and be harmed.

This film highlights many of the temporal discourses surrounding home and technology. In the same year, Mark Weiser published his seminal paper, "The Computer for the 21st century." In it, he describes a utopian future where technology is thoroughly integrated into our lives, providing for our every need. The first consumer Bluetooth device launched, enabling this seamless integration of life with technology. Yet at the same time, computer failure meant the world might end in just one year thanks to Y2K. Smart House showed young audiences how ubiquitous computing could be great and terrible.