Our lives are increasingly informed by an algorithmic paradigm. We are profiled and analysed, our behaviour is being translated into data and connected to larger bodies of data. But as technology begins to make autonomous decisions, it is critical to question humans' role in algorithmic logic. The logic reflected in the current technological landscape has implications for the interactions we have with our environment and our ways of living. However, in the dominant paradigm, human subjectivity is largely missing or founded in simplistic assumptions without considering users' perspectives on data, contextual significance, and situated values.

Second-order cybernetics, highlighting how meaning is constructed, encourages us to acknowledge the importance of humans in making sense of data, not just as producers of data. A concept such as smartness then becomes relational, a property subjectively assessed by users through a particular interaction rather than something that can be specified in itself.

The article explores an alternative to a purely algorithmic logic, through three practice-based experimental projects around the smart home idea. By taking a second-order cybernetic approach, the projects explore a different perspective on the human experience of the Internet of Things (IoT) in practice, concerning its background operation.