The Smart Home: How Consumers Craft New Service Networks by Combining Heterogeneous Smart Domestic Products

Abstract

Service research suggests homes are becoming increasingly connected as consumers automate and personalize new forms of service provision. Yet, large-scale empirical evidence on how and why consumers automate smart domestic products (SDPs) is lacking. To address this knowledge gap, we analyze 13,905 consumer-crafted, automated combinations of SDPs, totaling 1,144,094 installations, across 253 separate service providers on the web service IFTTT.com. An exploratory network analysis examines the topology of the network and an interpretive coding exercise reveals how consumers craft different styles of human-computer interaction to cocreate value. The results reveal that the SDP network is disassortative, is imbalanced, has a long-tailed degree distribution, and that popular services have high centrality across all product category combinations. We show that popular combinations of SDPs are primarily motivated by utilitarian value-seeking enacted through a preference for automated tasks outside of conscious attention, though more individualistic combinations are slightly more likely to be hedonistically inclined. We conclude by showing how these consumer-crafted forms of service provision within domestic environments reveal design redundancy and opportunities for service innovation.