What separates a good smart home from a truly great one? It’s not more features, more apps, or more automation, it’s asking the right questions.
In this episode, we explore why smart home design should start with psychology instead of technology. Using everyday examples, from train stations to music and lighting. We look at how uncertainty, perception, and emotion shape the way people experience their environment.
- Why focusing only on technology leads to wrong results.
- Why lighting should be designed like music, not like a volume knob
- How ambient, spot, glittering light and color temperature create emotions
- Why scenes, presence detection, and clear documentation matter more than specs
- How better explanations increase perceived value — especially in KNX projects
These are the human skills behind the technology — and they’re often the ones that get overlooked. Yet, they’re the ones that make the biggest difference.
If you want clients to understand why they need a smart home, start by designing feelings, not functions.
Follow along using the transcript below:
Do you want to be a master at smart home design? Then here’s the key: stop asking technological questions, and start asking psychological ones.
Let me give you an example: think about a train station. When a train is late, the technological question would be: How can we make the train faster? Do we improve the tracks, or do we redesign the engine? But the psychological question is: How can we make people more accepting of the fact that the train is late?
A simple solution could be adding a display that says, “Train will arrive in 5 minutes.” That’s it. It’s the uncertainty that makes people frustrated. When they know when the train is coming, they’re fine waiting those extra minutes. But when there’s no info? That’s when frustration kicks in.
So, what does this have to do with smart homes? Well, most smart home designers tend to focus on technology-driven questions. For example, take lighting. When you ask, What is good lighting? The usual answer is “You need X amount of lux, no glare and no flicker and you need to be able to dim down to 1%” this leads to solutions like dimmers, DALI and constant light control. Essentially, people treat lighting like a volume knob.
But here’s the thing: the eye is a sense just like your ears. You feel light and the way we react to light is the same as how we react to sound. But, You never hear someone say, “Give me 95dB of music for relaxation” or “I want 85dB to set the mood.” But we do that with lighting.
It doesn’t work with music, and it doesn’t work with light either. To change the mood with music, you don’t just turn the volume up or down. You change the rhythm, or swap instruments, maybe from a saxophone to a violin. If you want to change the mood in a room, you have to do the same with lighting.
Here’s how: divide lighting into categories. Ambient light is like a cloudy day—enough to see, but not boring. Spotlights focus attention and create an intense, harsh atmosphere, like a campfire. Then, there’s glittering light. A luxurious, welcoming feeling, like the sparkling light on a lake a sunny day. Try to go back on a cloudy day, it’s not the same. Add to that the color temperature, which controls your biorhythm, helping you feel either awake or relaxed.
By dividing light into these categories, you get four distinct variables, each controlling a specific feeling. This is a completely different approach compared to just using a dimmer as a “volume button.”
It all starts with asking psychological questions, not just technical ones. And when you do that, you end up with a completely different outcome.
Imagine explaining a smart home to a customer. Would you say, “You can dim your lights with your phone” or “Instead of dimming lights, I design different feelings in a room, at the touch of a button.”
Once someone understands the value of controlling emotions through light, that’s when you can say, “and to do that you need a smart home.”
Now, of course, you eventually need to ask practical questions like, “How can I control it?” Well, obviously, you can’t have ten switches in every room, so you need to have scenes — lots of scenes. And this is where it gets frustrating for me. Manufacturers don’t ask these types of questions, so we end up with applications that focus on volume control, and poorly implemented scene controls, especially in visualisations.
I think that’s why we don’t see presence sensors in every room of the house. The tech is there, but we don’t have applications for it.
When we start asking psychological questions, we begin to notice details that are easy to overlook, like how people understand and interact with controls. Take push buttons, for example. In a very simple home, unlabeled buttons might be acceptable. But imagine getting into a car with no icons or markings at all. Even something as basic as turning on the radio suddenly becomes frustrating. That frustration comes from a lack of information and the same principle applies to documentation.
How often is the functionality explained in a clear and easy manual? Do not underestimate the importance of clear information. Just like in the train station example, clear documentation and guidance reduce frustration. Without it, people eventually hit a wall, not because the system is bad, but because they don’t understand it.
And that’s when we start hearing reactions like: “KNX is too expensive,” because the value was never made clear. The same goes to “Keep it simple.”
But “keeping it simple” doesn’t mean making it shallow. It means making it understandable. If simplicity is fewer functions it also means less value. But we need more value so instead try to add documentation when the applications become more sophisticated.
So the next time you start a project, don’t start with the technology. Ask how the people living there should feel. If you get that question right, the rest becomes easy.
If you want to know more then go to forum.voiceofknx.com and start a discussion.
