Posted Jan 24, 2015, 1:48 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 10,130
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Passive house near Peterborough:
Quote:
In the age of ‘smart’ homes, sometimes dumb is best
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jan. 22 2015, 11:13 AM EST
Last updated Friday, Jan. 23 2015, 9:28 AM EST
Once upon a time, the only things usually called smart were people, fashions, investments and dogs.
Lots of other items, however, have become smart in the past few years. We now have smartphones, smart cars, smart thermostats, smart television sets. The adjective commonly means that the product, thanks to cybernetic engineering, can do more tricks than your smart dog ever could. Such smartness, of course, is widely considered desirable. It is said to make our lives interesting, easier to manage – and, to a degree, it probably does so.
Paul Dowsett, principal in the Toronto firm of Sustainable.TO Architecture + Building, does not sharply dissent from this opinion. Although critical of the vogue for smartness, he is no Luddite. He believes advanced technology has a useful role to play in the contemporary world, and in his own art, that of putting up liveable structures. What makes him edgy, however, is the stylish claim by high-tech enthusiasts that electronic wizardry is invariably better than dumb, often old-fashioned ways of making environments comfortable.
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