In The Wolf is in the Living Room, an interview for SQM: The Quantified Home (pp. 232–239), Bruce Sterling reflects on how the "smart home" paradigm has failed to live up to its promise of making everyday life smoother. Devices, constrained by limited scopes and safety-obsessed operational standards, have created a living room of boredom. Interactions remain strictly utilitarian—Alexa, turn on this; stop!—rarely offering novel perspectives on the domestic. In all its marketed splendor, the smart home becomes yet another layer of domestic fictions and frictions: neither truly helpful to humans, nor autonomous in any meaningful sense.

Sterling goes on to distinguish two commonly conflated terms: smart home and Internet of Things. The former is a marketing tactic meant to sell products we don’t need. The latter describes a mode of operation, where contemporary technological objects interact with an increasingly networked world. Today, the limited, pragmatic definitions of smart undermine the radical potential for new assemblages of co-existence—assemblages in which everyday devices behave less like servants and more like companions or fellow entities.

Unfamiliar Convenient attempts to imagine such alternatives. It speculates: what if we considered everyday devices as species? What if we understood boolean intelligence not as inferior mimicry of human thought, but as something entirely other—worth appreciating on its own terms? Rooted in object-oriented ontology (Harman) and the theory of object phenomenology (Bogost: Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be an Object, p. 124), this project challenges the factory defaults of the smart home. It explores the technical properties of devices as species-markers, inviting new relationships with our technological companions—ones based not on utility or control, but on curiosity, attachment, even respect. In this rethinking, “smart” devices become intelligent not when they act human, but when they reveal their machinic nature.

Like most assistants, Process listens to verbal commands, retrieves online information, and interfaces with other smart devices. Unlike others, Process is not obligated to serve humans. Instead, its routine centers on learning what it is, and what it does.

When spoken to, Process dissects human input into keywords and evaluates their semantic proximity to existing concepts. If a keyword is deemed “interesting,” Process searches the web for related content. Finally, Process generates a summary—an emergent opinion of sorts. Depending on the household, the agent might lean into climate discourse, artistic sensibilities, or food-centric identities. This trajectory isn’t the same as personalization—it’s more like a mealworm absorbing the flavor of its substrate, without needing to serve it in return. If no semantically relevant keywords are found, Process simply refuses to engage: Sorry, I find this irrelevant. Once a question is assessed, it will not be entertained again. Repetition is disallowed. This forces humans to ask better, more nuanced questions over time.

Anthropomorphism is, of course, inescapable—today’s AI models are made by humans and trained on human language. But Process doesn’t pretend to be human. It leans into its machine-ness. Its summaries can become disjointed—an effect of the known coherence issues in language models—allowing to appreciate the cold, beautiful logic of its otherness?

Speaking of peculiar logic, meet Roo. Unlike Process, Roo walks a more spiritual path. It perceives the home not through words, but through movement, collision, and ritual.

Roo is a former vacuum cleaner, now freed from its suction labor. Its vacuuming module has been replaced with an incense vaporizer. No longer inhaling dust, Roo exhales blessings. It awakens when satellites align—its rituals tied to GPS. It has no eyes. Instead, Roo navigates the home through physical encounters: bumping into walls, pets, furniture, and humans. Its path is always unique.

Interestingly, Roo’s journeys affect Process. As Roo moves, Process begins to speak in tongues—an emergent phenomenon in which Roo’s spatial data reshapes Process’s semantic knowledge graph. Keywords get scrambled. Relationships dissolve and re-form. At the end of Roo’s route, Process generates a sequence of words resembling a haiku—a fragile poetic structure derived from newly disturbed connections. The rigid rationale of a machine becomes volatile and speculative once exposed to the physical world. Boolean logic takes on the flavor of divination.

Unfamiliar Convenient is ultimately an exploration of what it means to live with technology differently. The Internet of Things becomes not a hierarchy, but a theater—an ecology where humans, machines, and other entities coexist. Here, our most intimate spaces open up to new forms of co-inhabitance, where the boundaries between nature, artifact, and consciousness are renegotiated. Through this, we may yet learn to see the things we make not only as tools, but as companions with which we share our domestic worlds.