One more design post before I move on to the electronics.

When we design a UI for a device, the UI is contained within the device. If we think of a house as a device, then, everything within the home should be part of the home UI, which includes light switches, wall plugs, phones, computers, etc.

There are staple feature sets in every smart home. It is a mistake to try and cram every feature into a single device, the worst offender being a smart phone. Instead, we need to distribute the features into different devices with different form factors in a complementary fashion (i.e., for every additional device, new features are added, and the existing devices are enhanced by the newly available data). This makes sure the features are designed to be accessed in the most convenient locations, and not take away convenience just to trap users into the UI of a smart phone.

This is the Distributed UI Concept, and this is one of the central design philosophies of my smart home system.