Consider how much homes have changed in the last century.
Those of you actually living in houses over 100 years old are excused from this exercise.
So, not that many changes. Someone from 1912 could walk into a house today and would be able to orient themselves fairly easily, even if the appliances were strange. Compare that to the changes they would observe in the horse-buggy, telegraph, and zeppelin industries. They would understand computers perfectly well – until you explained that they’re devices used to look at videos of funny cats, not accountants you hire to do math for you.
There are some changes, of course – electrical lamps are smaller, running water is more common, and servants’ quarters have been replaced with appliances and a laundry room. But while living in retrofitted houses from a century ago isn’t that unusual, nobody drives “fixer upper” 100 year old cars or sends messages by telegraph. The changes to homes in the last century have been a tiny fraction of the changes to almost all other industries – where others race ahead, houses are still in the gate.
Now, that’s not because nobody’s tried. In fact, we have a tag on this blog, #crashandburn, just for architects, engineers, and scientists who tried to change housing forever. The modern house has been wildly successful because it’s a winning formula – it provides the comfort people need, good use of volume, good weather resistance, and is easily adapted to conditions across the world.
But that doesn’t mean houses will stay the way they are forever. All the big changes to houses in the last century haven’t been changes to the house at all – they’ve been changes to how people interact with the house — washing machines instead of hours of scrubbing, refrigerators instead of large kitchens and regular grocer visits. And you don’t have to look far to see all the up-and-coming technology that changes how we interact with things – the internet, smartphones, robotics, integrated computing, and more. The house of the future will still look like a house, but living it will be as different from now as now is from 1912.
And to us, that real, tangible difference seems way cooler than fantastic tech-stories about “houses of the future.”
We’ve got a tag for that too, #inhabitedfuture – for when we ask everyone to stop and imagine a future that they would actually live in. It’s easy to make fun of futurists “predictions” of what houses will be like – buildings like overgrown iPods packed full of gadgets – but it’s a lot harder to imagine what sort of changes might really come in our day to day lives, and how we interact with the places we live.
That’s why this isn’t a blog about housing – it’s a blog about living, and how we’ll interact with the places we live. That’s why this isn’t a blog about the future, it’s a blog about next month, next year, five years from now, ten years from now. You can say anything you like about the future, but when you have to envision just how you’ll get from A to B, things get more complicated
We’ve broken it down a bit, of course. #houseeconomics articles for how houses and money might work differently in the future, #housetech for gadgets you might actually want to use, and #silentmarkets for articles about home construction and the housing market. But no matter where you are on this blog, it’s always about the same thing – how our relationships with our homes will change in the future, what developments we can look forward too, and which we should be nervous about.
Stick around. This stuff is pretty interesting.
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