A digital home making revolution

Radical changes in how we live now, and may do in the future, are creating challenges for how we design and construct our homes, says Steven Smith

It is important to differentiate between the terms house and home when considering sustainable housing issues. Houses are made by builders and consist of the walls, floors, rooms, windows and doors and the services of the building. Homes are made by the residents applying their homemaking skills to turn an empty house into the home they desire. This house and home relationship means that a street of identical houses, in time, transforms to become a row of unique homes each as individual as their occupants.

As we push towards decarbonisation, the focus of designers and builders is usually on strategies for improving the performance of houses. The construction and services technology which makes for higher performing, more energy efficient houses is now well known. Implementation of the necessary improvements is a matter of securing the appropriate financial, business and institutional arrangements – easier said than done at times but nevertheless an anticipated part of the world of constructing houses.

RADICAL CHANGES IN HOME MAKING

Less frequently or perhaps less carefully examined are the radical changes in home making – how we live now and may do in the future – and the impact of computer technology and internet services and the emergence of ‘the digital home’. These changes challenge familiar ideas about the purpose and function of domestic space. Aided by technology a home space can now easily transform to become global corporate HQ, back office, school classroom, games room, university lecture theatre, meeting space with friends and family, infinite shopping mall, library, concert hall, theatre – or at least an approximation of all these formerly separate functions and places. Even our consumption of media – music, film, TV – may be highly personalised and orchestrated via AI-based technologies.

Three major changes result from this digital home making revolution.

1.?? DIGITAL SERVICES

Firstly, the replacement of possessions with digital services. Record and film collections, libraries of books and encyclopaedias, collections of correspondence, catalogues and instruction manuals, slide collections, photo albums have substantially changed from physical domestic collections to streamed, data-based services. The private car, bicycle and tools, all become items to be supplied as needed via online services or lending and repair libraries.

The process of replacing domestic stuff with what is essentially data frees and changes the nature of space – it invites alternative purposes and may reduce the resources consumed in making the domestic clutter in the first place. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK citizens reached ‘peak stuff’ in 2003 and our consumption of material resources has been declining ever since – a tough challenge for consumption-driven retail and a fundamental change to our domestic habits. These changes also play into the mix of decreased demand for office space, high street retail dominance, and leisure spaces that were previously a much larger part of the economic and social life of a community.

2.?? GREATER FLEXIBILITY

Secondly, there is a need for houses to be designed to allow for much greater flexibility and intensity of space use over time to accommodate a much wider range of domestic activities than was conventionally envisioned. Innovative house design and planning can now be much less tightly defined by narrow conceptions of space use.

The significant environmental benefits of more intense utilisation of less space remains a rarity in the strategies to deliver a low carbon economy even though it may deliver the greatest impact. Much of the mainstream design and construction approach remains rooted in traditional lifestyle and home making models. Greater thought is needed as to the ways in which space is now used, how much is needed and where, in relation to the cost it generates in energy and carbon budgets – the entire cost of building, maintenance and occupation of space.

3.?? ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

Finally, the digital, data-driven world of technology is not free from environmental impacts. Digital home making, as well as technology-driven houses, relies on the generation and storage of vast quantities equivalent of the global airline industry.

Strategies for more environmentally sustainable living need to include not just improved energy performance of new and existing houses but also new design strategies taking account of the radically new ways in which we use our homes, interact within our communities, consume culture and meet our day-to-day needs. Assessment of the global as well as the local impacts of such fundamental changes to the way we live, must factor into energy, transport, land use and other infrastructure facilities far removed from the homes they serve.

Designing and constructing new forms of flexible houses to respond to new patterns of home making speaks to the core of the challenge of placemaking and creating sustainable homes. It is a challenge which requires thinking ‘beyond the box’, starting with strategic scale, designing well for density, and recognising just how much our lives continue to dramatically change.

Steven Smith is an architect with over 40 years professional experience working as an architect and urbanist in London and in Europe, Asia, Australia and USA. He is a panel member of The Design Commission for Wales. He founded his company urban narrative in 2010 after careers with consultants DEGW, and with Farrell and Partners in UK and Asia. Urban narrative is a design consultancy that works collaboratively with clients and a network of like-minded creative individuals on the reinvention of organisations, buildings and cities. Steve’s work is focussed on creating cultural and design narratives that are the inspiration for making places and buildings that are attractive, meaningful and valued by users.

This article was originally published in the Welsh Housing Quarterly - https://whq.org.uk/the-magazine/issue/134/