I’m sure the concept of smart home has already touched you. And you have thermostats, smart lights and many other smart devices set up at home trying to do their bit. Standalone, all these smart products would do a great deal in making life simpler, but unfortunately, having different devices doing their tasks can become slightly cluttered and cumbersome. To add more finesse to a modern home, a concept Nest Ceiling Fan – designed by Joseph Morlote for Google’s collective of smart home devices – has been embedded with a range of these devices to eliminate the clutter and make your chick ceiling fan the ultimate smart home hub.
Just like our appliances, ceiling fans have also received smart treatment in the past. The concept Nest Ceiling fan is a productive and more interesting take on the other smart fans that can only be turned on and off through a smart assistant. This new adaptation of a ceiling fan designed for the Google Nest lineup has been conceived as an all-in-one smart hub that would tie up all the smart products you have spread across each room in the house. The compact and stylish two-fin fan with omni-directional speaker, smart light bulb, sensors for the thermostat, and a smoke detector and alarm will replace each of the mentioned devices for good and leave you with a single contact point to create an interesting smart home setup.
Designer: Joseph Morlote
Arguably, ceiling fans offer a very limited cooling relief. If you live in a warmer climate, you’d definitely prefer air conditioning over a ceiling fan; though using a ceiling fan with an air conditioner will help improve efficiency and eventually allow you to lower the energy costs. There is no denying the fact that fans carry out cooling at a much cheaper price point and therefore a fan dangling from the ceiling in the center of the room is a nice vantage point to perhaps act as a unified hub for all your smart home requirements.
As a ceiling fan with a smart speaker, light, thermostat and smoke detector onboard, the concept fan will allow you to interact through the Google Assistant/app to just one device, thus ensuring you don’t need these products installed separately anywhere in the house. Providing a perfect balance of performance and smart design, this fan in addition to offering cool air, will disperse music from your playlist in every direction of the room with a click of a button or your voice command.
Ideal for replacing the smart light bulb and traditional wall switches, you are using, the ceiling fan has its own LED light bulb that contains software to connect to a smart home assistant, an app, or some other mobile devices and can automate your lights so you can control it remotely. It is also embedded with a thermostat to automate the central heating system or an integrated smart smoke detector that can alert everyone with a warning alarm in case of a fire in the house.
It is a prerequisite for the multifunctional Google Nest Ceiling Fan to be equipped with microphones so that it can hear your commands to the Google Assistant from across the room. However, the microphone could be used for eavesdropping! Smart home products including those from Google, are notorious for constantly listening to our conversations, as they are always on the lookout for wake word “Hey Google.” I’m assuming, the fan will not include a camera as sitting right above the head it would have a terrible vantage point, so the risk of privacy breach there is lower. But even if we were to consider that the microphones would have compromised reception (owing to their high positioning), the mics will be listening to us perpetually and storing information in the cloud. You would have to make an effort to turn the mics off when not required, which could limit the fan’s productivity as smart hub around the clock.
The otherwise effectively designed product comes in the existing color theme of Google products, which is guaranteed to lighten up the mood and blend with the interiors of the room where it is installed. The installation is going to be somewhat complicated with all the wiring and drilling required, but that’s going to be the case with any ceiling fan, and it’s only a one-time cost for your smart home’s future with a ceiling fan hub as smart as this.
Disclaimer: This project is a conceptual product visualization by design student Joseph Morlote and is not affiliated with Google Nest or their product line.
