Oh, But The Home Of The Future Is Sooooo 1939

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house.”

- Popular Mechanics “The Electrice Home of the Future,” Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The “Home Of The Future” is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t’s 2013, and you’ve just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you’ll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others — such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing — haven’t made it into people’s homes … yet.

Check out the full article here