The Story Behind CEDIA: The Association for Smart Home Professionals

How do your products and services enhance interior design projects?

If your clients are asking about how technology can be integrated within your interior design, then, you don’t have to be an expert, you just need to know where to find one.

CEDIA is built upon industry leading education and certification, and cutting-edge technology training to ensure that CEDIA members are well-placed to help designers include technology effectively and elegantly within their designs.

CEDIA offers a Finder Service on its website. This allows interior designers to locate their nearest Smart Home Professional.

What value does your specialist sector add to the industry?

A CEDIA smart home professional will make sure that the technology within a property is professionally designed and installed with systems integrated to optimise comfort, performance, reliability and ease of use.

They will also deliver a system that is perfectly attuned to the client’s lifestyle and family needs, and ensure that it blends with the interior design scheme within the home.

How do you work with interior designers?

Integrating smart home technology for a secure and easy to use experience, and without compromising the home’s décor, demands the skills of a professional — someone who has the technical ability to bring everything together in a synergistic ‘whole home’ experience. This is where CEDIA members are your perfect professional partner.

Whether your client is building from scratch or renovating their home, it’s important to bring a CEDIA member onto the project design team early to provide expert advice and the necessary system design and planning skills. They understand that technology in the home is a significant investment and will be able to advise on the smart home solutions that are right for your scheme and your client’s lifestyle.

They are also the best-informed professionals and trained in the latest technologies, design, project management, and installation techniques to ensure the best possible professional smart home for your project.

What has been your most significant company highlight or success from the past year?

CEDIA offers an extensive range of RIBA accredited CPD courses to help interior designers understand how they can incorporate technology successfully into their schemes. These cover everything from an introduction to the smart home to outdoor entertainment and from cinema and media room design to lighting control. More information can be found here.

Another highlight is the CEDIA Smart Home Awards which celebrate professionalism and excellence within the smart home profession. Interior designers can be inspired to kick-start their next project and find ideas and potential solutions to common interior design challenges when working with technology. Click here to find out more.

What are the latest trends you’ve noticed in your client’s requests?

The 2023 Professional Smart Home Market Analysis from CEDIA gives a fascinating insight into the likely direction of this fast-growing sector. The four business categories expected to grow the most in 2024 are home cinema, media rooms, outdoor entertainment systems, and lighting/shading.

As homeowners experience the fantastic possibilities of a professionally installed entertainment space at home, alongside the rise of streaming technology, private cinema rooms are becoming sought after by more and more people. The picture quality delivered by native 4K projection systems is quite breathtaking and supported by the performance of exceptional immersive sound systems. The result is a visceral, emotional, and completely immersive connection with big screen movie, serial, or sports watching that is just incredible.

It’s clear that the home is now a multi-functional space that provides a place of rest and relaxation as well as a secure and practical home office, a learning environment, a cinema, gaming room and fitness suite.

A professionally installed smart home taps into this new way of life, by enabling multi-purpose use within the one space. Take media rooms as an example. These are versatile, multi-media and multi-functional spaces that can work as a home working environment during the day, but also provide a great area for TV viewing, listening to music, movie-watching on a drop-down screen and projector system or children’s gaming at other times. Their popularity is growing. Media room design and installation requires the services of professional smart home integration companies to make sure that the technology can deliver on the high-level versatility, reliability and ease of use benefits they demand.

We’re also seeing growth in outdoor lighting and entertainment systems. This technology helps people to be sociable and connect with their garden spaces in a positive way. Smart home lighting and entertainment allows your clients to use their outdoor spaces for longer – and in more ways – than ever before. Technology here also brings significant wellness and mental health benefits to consumers who are better able to connect with the outdoors, at home.

Meanwhile, smart lighting and shading is another major growth area. As well as delivering energy efficiency using dimming technology and location sensors, lighting control systems can create beautiful lighting scenes, designed for specific activities, or to highlight the beautiful interior design, architecture, or decoration of a home. Lighting can also be used to enhance the natural energy cycles of the human body – the so-called circadian rhythm – by mimicking the intensity and colour of the sun at different times of day, to help homeowners feel energised or relaxed, and support better sleep. Smart shading can have not only significant comfort benefits for customers, but can also help with energy efficiency of a home, controlling the climate by blocking heat from the sun, or opening to reap the benefits of the sun’s thermal energy.

Wellness touches every facet of the home and we see it becoming more and more important in the future. Homeowners are actively seeking solutions that can enhance air quality, optimise lighting, control temperature and manage humidity to create an environment that boosts physical and mental health.

How do you see the interior design industry evolving in the year ahead?

As more and more consumers embrace integrated technology into their home and lifestyle, so we see our industry collaborating much more closely with interior designers.

Working together, we can create beautifully elegant interiors and amazing experiences enabled by professionally installed and integrated technology. It’s an exciting time!

Is there anything new you are excited to be working on?

We’re excited to continue to educate interior designers on the many ways that technology can enhance the lifestyle of their customers. Whether through inspirational case studies, video content, or CPD classes, CEDIA is constantly analysing the most important industry trends, and working to create ways to communicate these to key partners is the residential design and build industries.

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