Future Living

Assignment

The overall goal of this project is not housing that can be built today, or even tomorrow, but housing that will evolve to take advantage of technologies now just in stages of early development. Enlightened response to fast-changing environmental conditions and the new Technologies that can deal with them is the goal and the challenge. What will be needed is a new approach to home and housing that integrates support for human aspirations with means for achieving self-sufficiency wherever possible. This project should point the way by projecting the capabilities beginning to emerge from the new technologies in a design for a housing system that could be built in the not-too-distant future.

Synopsis

A system of components for future housing that supports human aspirations while achieving maximum environmental and economic self-sufficiency.

Problem

In the developed world, housing has become an object of consumption. As middle classes have raised their standards of living, excess earnings have been used to buy larger, more luxurious homes and to outfit them with space-filling objects of consumption. Wasteful living now consumes a sizeable portion of our resources, a condition that has been tolerable if not desirable, but cannot continue. The forces of population growth, climate change and resource depletion will make it necessary for all—those living in developed and developing nations alike—to reduce human impact on the Earth’s resources. The alternative is not conceivable.

Proposed User Experience

In this project, housing is examined as a means for contributing to a reduced impact. In the near future, that capability will become routine service. For a household with even a moderate amount of these paper forms of information, the space saving will be remarkable, and information technology has much more to offer for reducing consumption and managing operations.

As the system has evolved, three major areas of concern have emerged: system performance, personal development and social development. System performance covered the workings of systems to be incorporated; personal development concerned the may ways that the system could support personal growth from standpoints of physical, mental and emotional development; and social development brought connection to community and the growth of individuals as social beings prepared to work together for common goals.

Prototype

Final Results

More details of the project can be found in the presentation and report.