Towards The Open Source Home

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The housing market is in shambles. Thanks to years of unsavory lending practices, home foreclosures are at record highs across the country, and what was once a safe, reliable investment -- or at least something to "flip" for a quick profit -- has become an outright liability.

But from the ashes of this current housing meltdown, a new model for building and designing homes is poised to emerge, one fueled not only by technological innovation and a desire to reduce our footprint on the planet, but ultimately a complete re-imagining of what the home can and should be.

Whereas the craft-based approach to home design has yielded more suburban sprawl and cheaply-built, cookie-cutter McMansions, under this new model, residential design, fabrication, and technology integration will be used together to build high-performance, low-energy homes that are cost-effective, flexible and ubiquitous.

"Think of it as the iPhone approach to home design," says Michelle Kaufmann, a leading green architect, and founder of Michelle Kaufmann Designs. "The iPhone isn't just one thing. It's a phone, an e-mail device, a music player, all in one package. Even more importantly, it's customizable for each person. That's what we're trying to do with homes."

In other words, instead of a place to store all your shiny new technology, your future home itself will be the next great gadget.

DIY Design

Every era has its "future home." Whether it's Richard Buckminster

Fuller's Dymaxion Dwelling Machine or the Monsanto House of the

Future, these architectural flights of fancy speak more to the conceptual preoccupations of designers than any realistic vision of future living.

Yet a new generation of architects, builders and entrepreneurs are hoping to change this clichéd notion with practical and (most importantly) scalable solutions for building and designing houses.

Rather than any singular overriding design or vision, this new model aims to adopt what is basically a flexible, mass-customization home design system -- one that gives homeowners themselves the tools to design their own living spaces. Think Apple and Dell instead of Toll Brothers.

"The future of housing is really much more of an industrial design process than a craft," says Kent Larson, an architect and director of the House_n Research Consortium and the Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) at MIT.

"Ultimately, we're moving toward an open source (home design) system that's very distributed. The end user will be empowered with web-based tools and configurators to construct something unique and singular."

In essence, Larson is talking about something analogous to Apple or Dell's online stores -- but understandably a bit more complex.

Under this new DIY design model, architects don't actually design houses anymore, he says. Instead, they'll simply provide the tools that allow people to build their own. Similarly, manufacturers will be transformed into tier one suppliers and builders will become the assemblers. Like today's consumer electronics industry, the system as a whole will be connected with standards to ensure quality and drive down prices.

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