This paper focuses on how smart technologies integrated in a one-family home, and particularly a window, offer unique challenges and opportunities for designing buildings with the best possible environments for people and nature. Toward an interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach, we address the interaction between daylight defined in technical terms and daylight defined in aesthetic, architectural terms. Through field tests of a Danish carbon-neutral home and an analysis of five key design parameters, we explore the contradictions and potentials in smart buildings, using the smart window as an example of how quality of life and technical advances are synthesized and when they contradict. We focus on the need to define quantitative and qualitative values and synthesize these in a multidimensional design approach, toward allowing the house to adapt to a changing climate, satisfy the human needs of the occupants, together with meeting calculated energy requirements. Thus, integrating windows as key design elements in energy-positive buildings addresses aesthetic as well as technical potentials. This integration of factors from different fields can both support and counterbalance one another in the design process. We maintain that a hybrid approach to the energy design is central. The study illuminates an approach of the design of smart houses as living organisms by connecting technology with the needs of the occupants with the power and beauty of daylight.
