The future of homes is more than simply a design problem. It’s also a problem about belonging. And the technology we’re building into our homes today will either help us solve it or make it harder to see.

How we live our lives is also changing. More people are renting longer, living alone, or aging without nearby family. The single-family home on a quarter-acre section is no longer the default, and the housing systems built around it are struggling to catch up.

Smart home technology is starting to fill this gap, but the question is whether it’s being designed for the lives people are actually living.

Across cultures and across time, there’s a consistent anthropological understanding that home has always been the unit of belonging. And what’s emerging now is a more expansive definition of what home can be.

In ...