My own approach to this from a few years ago is to have a system that tries to determine what you want to do and adjusts the lights accordingly, while allowing manual override for the times it gets it wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk

That's awesome. Our simple system is just to have motion detector bulbs in the hallway and bathroom, which is where you usually want lights to turn on when there are people moving in those spaces.

I hate lights on motion (or sound) detectors. What if you want to stay there for while, maybe talking with a guest, or reading some paper? Or maybe you want to hook something on the wall?

Well placed switches are good enough, no?

I see what you mean and admit it has happened perhaps twice so far that the light went out when I needed it. But the times when walking in darkness at night or when coming home are much more often, so overall it has been a win. Not to mention saving electricity, as you never forget to turn off the lights.

Me too, which is why I used the Kinect, which detects presence without motion, even in the dark.

That's awesome, have you considered blogging about your setup?

I have indeed: http://blog.mikebourgeous.com/2011/03/08/home-automation-and...

Hope you find it informative :-)

Wow. That is really incredible! See, that's the living-in-the-future kind of thing I want today!

Why make this so complex?

Imagine you go in a hotel room, all this stuff is written in Chinese, you just woke in the night with an urgent natural need, and you just want a light on right now! So you have to read a sign with "go to bathroom"?

I think the idea of Don Norman is actually good for a big shared meeting room, were different people will have to change the lighting occasionally.

But for homes (and hotel rooms), just place your switches in a logical place and avoid too many lamps, that should be enough.

Or maybe this: have switches on main light at the doors of a room, and then each individual lamp has its switch on its cord. Wouldn't that be good enough?

Code in the various US cities I've lived in generally requires switches for a room be at a certain height and a certain distance from egress-ingress doors. I think it may have something to do with handicap accessibility, but generally there's a reason in most modern homes, you don't have to think about where the switch is.

For homes that's okay. Except overhead lights are not as nice as lamps, so turning on all the lamps you use with one switch is cool. Modern high efficiency LED bulbs can have odd lighting so having a few of these in lamps gives a much nicer effect.

And we want to encourage people to turn off lights when they're not being used, so a single switch is again useful. This might be saving tiny amounts of energy, but we want to move to a world where this kind of behaviour is built in.

The internet-of-things is rapidly getting there.

<shameless self plug> For example, my Android app, LampShade.io, has user-defined lighting 'moods' that work with the Philips Hue.

Currently these are primarily triggered via direct user interaction or through automation apps such as Tasker. I've also built a voice-controlled edition for Google Glass.

The app is still not as brainlessly convenient as a physical switch though. I don't think it can become that convenient without contextual inferring the state of the room/user, which may require more prevalent internet-of-things sensors to accomplish.

</shameless-self-plug>

A thumbs-up for LampShade. It's far better than the horrible stock application for Hue lamps (and the recent update made for an even worse UX on iOS). I haven't even dug into the potential of Tasker integration and the like.

But you're right, as good as LampShade may be I still have to whip out the phone, fire up LampShade, swipe to the light or scene that I want, tap a button. Thing is, I don't know how to make it better, I don't think I'm wired to come up with the clever solution. I've considered NFC tags on the wall, but I don't think I'm getting that past the wife. (Plus she's an iOS girl, so NFC won't do her any good.)

Many LampShade.io power users take the NFC route. CNET TV's 'The Fix' even used LampShade.io with NFC in an episode. The issue with NFC is it only works when one's Android is unlocked...

I believe good lockscreen widgets will be more convenient that NFC, and my next big update will focus on this.

Automation, scheduled lighting, predictive lighting(not yet implemented, think Nest), etc are all very powerful, but I doubt they will ever be comprehensive enough for all daily home lighting interaction.

The only lighting system I've experienced in a very, very expensive home was kind of hilariously bad. One person turning on the whole house's lights at 3am, having to wave at a sensor every 5 minutes while reading - made me think dumb switches weren't such a bad idea.

I'm working in a recent building with no lightswitches. Since writing code doesn't involve a lot of movement, I have to wave at the sensor every so often when it goes dark. And the whole building was built to host IT companies, so it's a problem for nearly everyone.

There are few things as annoying as that.

circa 1999, GTE Internetworking (which had been BBN and would be part of Verizon later) moved to a new office building in Burlington, MA. There were several design failures there (the carpet patterns had moire effects, the main corridor was curved so that you could not see what was up ahead) and the biggest failure was the automatic motion-sensing light switches in every office.

They were designed to save money, because nobody would forget to turn off the lights. They did an excellent job of keeping people in the dark, partially because of the above sensor problem -- typing on a keyboard doesn't provide enough movement to trigger the sensors -- and partially because of their incredibly high failure rate.

At about $50 per sensor module installed, they had to keep an electrician on full-time replacing sensors. I heard that eventually they stopped relying on trouble tickets and just swept the building over about a two week cycle.

Meanwhile, people bought lights that they could control by themselves. Many of them were halogens running on 150 to 450W.

Failed all the way around.

You could try rigging a cheap metronome to the sensor. Or even an led that lights every few minutes.

We managed to get hold of some kind of remote that's supposed to disable the sensor for two hours (though it's difficult to actually test, since there's no feedback at all when pressing it).

Since we're already using a Raspberry Pi for other purposes, I have the project of decoding the remote's protocol and driving an infrared led from one of the RPI's GPIO ports.

At Mozilla's mountain view office, the lights automatically turn off at night. To keep them on, you have to call a phone number and punch in what floor you are on. But of course this was annoying because you weren't always near a phone or aware of the number, so there is an intranet website that uses some VoIP service to phone the building controller to keep the lights on.

Motorised moving object on a microcontroller, perhaps?

Still, it might be an interesting halfway point -- or a useful tool for designing such lighting scenarios -- to take into account where lights are on a floor plan. Currently, Hue lights (and WeMo switches) are the equivalent of lightswitches in a row, numbered and/or named and yet in any random order. It'd be a lot more interesting if I could control groups of switches as easily as one, without having to specify groups manually -- and the most logical way to group would be by proximity (knowing where walls are; and excluding type of lightbulb since that's often, though not always, identical). So it would make more sense to me if home automation actually cared about my home, but in the piece-by-piece approach that hasn't happened yet. I'll be writing my own software later this year to make up for it, but it'd be nice to see better, general purpose approaches, such as in the original article (with physical switches).

I've never really felt like the binary model is lacking flexibility for me. There may be some rare occasions where I want some dimming, but overall I think it works well