Towards The Open Source Home

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The Upgradable Home
While this notion of flexible, DIY design will be key to reshaping the housing industry, so too will the actual materials being used to build these homes. According to Paul Warner, president of Michelle Kaufmann Designs, we'll continue to see a profound shift in the materials we use to build our living spaces.

Better insulation, high quality laminated woods, even repurposed or recycled materials -- all will play an increasingly important role in home fabrication.

But rather than a piecemeal approach to using these new materials (greening up your home by using bamboo flooring or installing LED lighting), precedence will be given to how all these materials work in congress.

"One of the things you do in gadget design is you balance all the product requirements," notes Warner. "All these parts need to be worked out into a system that performs well as a whole."

Like any gadget, the future home will only as good as its weakest link. And as the housing industry moves towards this new mass-customization model, it'll ultimately be the sum of the parts (the "experience") that counts.

In drawing inspiration from the electronics industry, it's important to note that there will be one major difference in building future homes: turnover. Rather than the planned obsolesce that dominates the CE industry, people will want the homes they build or renovate to last.

As such, upgradability will become even more important as future houses are built. Inevitably, newer, improved materials will emerge. So like swapping out your hard drive on your laptop or upgrading its memory, the home of the future will also be built with the assumption that newer materials will be incorporated over its lifetime.

"The upgradability of homes and buildings will play a huge role in future design, and creating a kind of smart spine or shell that can be easily updated with newer parts will be another part of the overall housing system," says Warner.

Process, Not Craft
Imagine if your car was put together by someone who not only didn't make the parts, but who also had absolutely no hand in its overall design. Strangely, this is how homes have been built in the U.S for the better part of a century. By almost all standards, it's been a miserable failure, encouraging only the proliferation of "dumb boxes" that are haphazardly nailed together. Pre-fabrication promises to change this. While the idea of the pre-fabricated home is far from new, many architects see the current housing plight as the catalyst that could finally spark a thriving pre-fab industry here in the U.S.

Indeed, as designing homes becomes more and more like designing gadgets or cars, mass production will become integral. Not only does this system set a reliable bar for quality and scalable base, it also lowers overall costs.

Turns out, a proof of concept model already exists. In parts of
Europe, homes are already built in these modern, automated factories.
Such factories churn out completed walls, floor and roof panels (complete with siding, windows and insulation) and all are assembled with the help of computerized, automated equipment.

Once completed, the parts are simply loaded onto trucks, shipped to the site and erected by in-house trained crews.

A Necessary Evil
If nothing else, the recent meltdown in the housing market has forced everyone to rethink the fundamentals of what a house is and what it can be.

"In some senses, the collapse of the housing industry is the best thing that's ever happened," says Larson. "The industry was fat and happy, doing sloppy things while churning out garbage and making tons of money."

"What is becoming evident to a lot of people in the industry is the old model doesn't work. And probably never will again."

Sure, it will take plenty of future investment and some further changes to regulatory laws for the housing industry to undergo the necessary metamorphosis, but we appear to be on the right path.

"I'm optimistic about the future," says Nabih Tahan, an architect who's building one of the first passive houses in the U.S. in Berkeley, California. "People are becoming increasingly savvy about their homes, and I think they are going to take the opportunity to do things in a different way now -- producing buildings and houses that are healthy and sustainable. This movement is starting."

In the meantime, the good news is that people are continuing to implement some of these new principles and concepts themselves, thanks to a wealth of free information from organizations and companies.

Like a gadget that doesn't quite live up to its full potential, savvy home owners are increasingly hacking their homes to fit their individual needs. It may be a temporary band-aid until a new housing market finally emerges, but as Warner notes: "A band aid is good if you're bleeding."

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