The international think tank, Home Renaissance Foundation, launches its latest book The Home in the Digital Age on Monday 7 February at the House of Commons during a session hosted by Miriam Cates MP.

The aim is to analyse the impact of artificial intelligence on the home and the policy implications with experts and to open the floor to attendees.

Contributions by:

– Bryan K. Sanderson CBE, Chair of Home Renaissance Foundation (HRF)

– Anne Fennell, Chair of Mothers At Home Matter (MAHM)

– Dr. Stephen Davies, Historian and Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a key contributor to the book The Home in the Digital Age.

– Dr. Tom Harrison, Director of Education at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, and author of the book Thrive: How to cultivate character so your children can flourish online.

The session will end with an opportunity for further discussion and questions.

Dear friends,
It is a pleasure to take this opportunity to get back in touch with you to give a brief recap of some of HRF’s most significant activities carried out in 2021. A year marked by the hope of vaccines but also by the uncertainty of new variants that have slightly destabilised the recovery and the return to normality.

We started the year with the virtual workshops of our conference ‘Happy Homes, Happy Society?’ and greatly appreciated the work done by the researchers who presented their papers. We are delighted that Routledge will be publishing this work – our third publication with them. As I write, the editors, Maria Teresa Russo, Antonio Argandoña and Richard Peatfield are putting together the final preparation for the book..

“The levels of mental disorders, depression and even suicide have increased among the new generations of university students. It is an epidemic that has to do with the impact of technology on our way of life”, Ignacio Aizpún, director general of ATAM.

Madrid | 5 Nov 2021. On the occasion of the presentation of the book The Home in the Digital Age by the international think tank Home Renaissance Foundation, a round table discussion with experts took place last week at Telefónica Foundation to analyse the impact of technology in the home.

The impact of technology on homes and society as a whole is evident, “it is even transforming the way our minds communicate. This has consequences and is causing new diseases due to maladjustment,” explained Ignacio Aizpún, director general of ATAM.

The sociologist and member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts, Julio Díez Nicolás, stated that technology has been with us since the Stone Age, because human beings must survive. Thanks to human intelligence and life in society, people are adapting. “Technology has always been the fundamental factor of social change because it provides us with a different future. Today there are five inventions that will change our lives: artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, holograms and virtual reality,” said Díaz.

But what is Artificial Intelligence and how does it affect our daily lives? María José Monferrer, an engineer and founder of AI-verse, tried to answer this question. She defined AI as a “multidisciplinary field of science and engineering whose aim is to create intelligent machines that emulate human intelligence and, eventually, surpass that intelligence. Therein lies the risk.

Monferrer warned that we have implemented some technologies in the home, but we are only at the beginning of the uses we will be able to make of AI. So it’s a good time to stop and assess the risks. It is important to think about how we can apply the rules to protect the fundamental rights at stake: personal data protection, privacy and non-discrimination.

ATAM is clear about the use of AI, as Aizpún stated, “we need to be able to process the information that AI provides us with in the form of data to learn more about the person, their situation, their health variables, their activity, their functioning, their context. Only by transmitting, governing and activating this data in a secure way will we be able to generate responses and solutions that allow the disabled or dependent person to continue living at home in optimal conditions of safety, health and integrity”.

The three speakers and the Director-General of Childhood, Family and Birth Promotion, Alberto San Juan, who closed the event, agreed on the importance of putting the person at the centre of this technological transformation and on continuous, personal and family training as a solution to many of the challenges presented by technologies in the home. “The family must be cared for as the most precious asset and this is done with love, patience and training. The lifelong School for Parents is still essential and necessary. In the Community of Madrid we are facing real dramas due to the misuse of technology among young people,” warned San Juan.

In 2008, the Community of Madrid created a service to help families, inviting them to discuss their concerns about the misuse of technology in the home.  Alberto San Juan explained “we attend to families with children between 10 and 18 years old. Families come when they suspect that their children’s relationship with technology is not good and is not helping family coexistence. Young people are sometimes betting on each other having a 24, 48, which means spending two days in a row playing games and connected to the Internet”.

Despite the risks that technology can pose for households, it was clear that technology is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, in itself, it depends on the use that people make of it, although Aizpún wanted to stress that we have an important mission, “we must create new social institutions, new models of social organisation that allow human beings to adapt to these new environmental conditions that technology is creating”.

The event can be watched again here.

We are delighted to announce our next face-to-face event. The home in the digital age. The impact of Artificial Intelligence in our homes.
On the occasion of the publication of the book, The Home in the Digital Age, we will be holding a round table discussion with experts to analyse the impact of Artificial Intelligence in our homes on Thursday 4 November at 12.00h at the Telefónica Foundation headquarters in Madrid (c/ Fuencarral 3).

The event will be opened by Professor Antonio Argandoña, Emeritus of IESE and Director of HRF, and the round table will be moderated by Professor Matilde Santos from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

The participants will be:
– Ignacio Aizpún, Director General of ATAM
– María José Monferrer, President of AIverseTech
– Juan Diez Nicolás, President of the Spanish Delegation of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Founder of the CIS.

And the event will be closed by Alberto San Juan, the Director-General of Childhood, Family and Birth Promotion of the Community of Madrid.

Places are limited, so please, register here.

We are delighted to announce that our latest book is already here! The digital age is a reality and the transformation of our homes is not a trivial matter. What do we know about new technologies? Are we right to embrace them? Are they developed within a legal, social, moral and ethical framework? What are the pros and cons to let them into our places?

Published by Routledge as a part of their Advances in Sociology series, ‘The home in the Digital Age’ is a set of multidisciplinary studies exploring the impact of digital technologies on the home with a shift of emphasis from the technology itself to the people living and using them in their homes.

The book covers a wide variety of topics on the design, introduction and use of digital technologies in the home, combining the technological dimension with the cognitive, emotional, cultural and symbolic dimensions of the gadgets that incorporate digital technologies and project them into people’s lives.

This publication brings together nine different contributions from scholars, researchers and practitioners from several disciplines and professional backgrounds including a preface by Sonia Livingstone, a leading figure from the Digital Futures Commission.

See here the index of the book, edited by Prof. Antonio Argandoña, Joy Malala and Richard Peatfield and how to order a hardcopy or an e-book with a discount code.

Its impact cannot be overlooked.
There’s no denying that it is constantly evolving and could have significant repercussions on our lives in the years ahead.

We are delighted to announce a new research partnership with the International Centre for Work and Family (ICWF) at IESE Business School, Spain. The ICWF, led by its director, Professor Mireia Las Heras, has as its focus the interrelated benefits and challenges of work and family life. HRF’s unique and pioneering perspective on the life and work of the home both complements and enhances this work. Although the agreed initial four year research partnership is at an early stage, it is clear that the focus of the project very valuably reflects the mutual interests of HRF and ICWF.

The following is ICWF’s summary of the vision of the collaboration and research, a vision and confidence shared by HRF:

“Our goal with this collaboration is to conduct, publish, and disseminate rigorous research that contributes in creating a greater recognition for the work that goes into creating healthy and strong home and family environments. Work, family, and home lives play prominent roles in individuals’ wellbeing, satisfaction and functioning. There is a clear need to better understand the interplay between these life spheres. We ground our research on positive organizational scholarship, which allows us to focus on life-giving dynamics, optimal functioning, and enhanced capabilities and strengths. Our goal is to identify individual and collective (at the family level) strengths (i.e. attributes and processes) and discover how those enable human flourishing (i.e. goodness, generativity, growth, generosity, and resilience).”

Regular updates on the partnership and project will be posted in due course, in the meantime, you can see more about  Professor Las Heras and her team by visiting the Research Partnerships page on this website.

English ‘Caring at Home for those with extra Needs’

Español “El Cuidado en el Hogar de Personas con Discapacidad”

A few months ago we received a request: Why not show the world that homes, where people live with disabilities, are happy homes? Why not make visible the difficulties that these families live through and the courage with which they face them? Why not praise this example at a time when society becomes blocked and frustrated at the slightest obstacle?

And we said: “Yes.”

At Home Renaissance Foundation we have talked many times about the importance of home care. But we present a new perspective – that if in itself care is vital in the development of the person, then it is even more so with those facing difficulties.

We are proud of what we have achieved. It has not been easy because these people are so humble that the last thing they want is to be the protagonists of anything. But they deserve it. Them, their families, their environments. For their attitude, for their courage, for their way of looking at life, for their determination, their effort and their example. Because there is nothing impossible for them and they are a constant lesson in self-improvement.

Thanks for agreeing to participate in this project. Society needs you more than ever.
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