What Makes a House Feel Like Home in the Age of AI | The Future of Homes
The future of homes is more than simply a design problem. It’s also becoming a problem about belonging. And the technology we’re building into our homes today will either help us solve it or make it harder to see.
How we live our lives is changing. More people are renting longer, living alone, or aging without nearby family. The single-family home on a quarter-acre section is no longer the default, and the housing systems built around it are struggling to catch up.
Smart home technology is starting to fill this gap, but the question is whether it’s being designed for the lives people are actually living. Across cultures and across time, there’s a consistent anthropological understanding that home has always been the unit of belonging.
And what’s emerging now is a more expansive definition of what home can be.
Inside the episode:
Opening: thoughts on belonging, a Ponsonby flat, and the question of what actually makes a place feel like home?
Current State of Play: Why our definition of home is evolving. From demographic change, the decline of the traditional path, and what happens when housing no longer matches how people live
A Look Back in Time: From Robot and Frank and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to Bauhaus and brutalism... how different eras circle the same question about how we live
Futuristic Insights: Homes that produce rather than consume, ambient AI that learns rather than controls, companion tech for people living alone, and new ownership models reshaping what it means to have a home
Bringing This Into Today: What architects, technologists, and individuals can actually do differently today, especially the small decisions that shape how a home feels over time
Closing: Why no amount of technical sophistication will make a home feel like one unless the people inside it feel like they belong there