Thank you for your reflections, Alexander. I should of course have remembered your and Priya Prakash’s pioneering work in this area, not least having given a wee talk at the lauch of the Digital Wellbeing Showroom at The Shop at Bluebird in 2006 (and was until recently using the conical device charging ‘pot’ I bought from the showroom). I wasn’t aware of Digital Plumbers, and need to do more research, I suspect.

Interesting that the value was in installation/services rather than the sale of the product, though I appreciate the Showroom was trying to add value to sales. This relates to my comment to Tony Pritchard in the LinkedIn discussion about where the value lies; perhaps with ‘standard’ products such as the Hive central heating products the economies of scale tip the, er, scales.

Your note on problem solving methods is a bit Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the issue of such methods is one I try to instil with clients, and your approach is salutary, in a way acknowledging that the products don’t work reliably and inter-operability is even sketchier.

The lack of ‘integrated digital lifestyle services’ you not is significant. Again, Tony Pritchard notes that utility companies are crossing over to embrace more utilities — I guess as telecoms and media companies did with three- and four-way plays around telephony, Internet, entertainment and mobile — in the 00s. But they’ve not yet become ‘integrated digital lifestyle services’.

How optimistic should we be that the all-things-to-all-women ‘AI solutions’ will automate any of these challenges? Do we have any examples to date?