‘Roll it’ is not the future, but is good futures thinking

Posted by Adam Gordon on May 21, 2010 in all, design, innovation, lifestyles & values, scenario planning | 1 comment

I’m taken with these pictures of an experimental apartment created by institutes at the University of Karlsruhe, as featured in ArchDaily and Detail.

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The point is, this is not the future of housing. Many hyper-efficient solutions have been designed over the years — many such “machines for living in,” that worked perfectly as rational solutions but failed the social-market adoption test, and therefore did not become part of the future. The future is always what we (as a whole) choose from among what designers and technologists can create.

This prototype will fail it’s future-adoption test. Humans don’t live rationally. If I rolled my desk to the ceiling, I’d be showered with papers and headphones and flying coffee cups. You would too, no doubt.

Having said that, the inventive thinking here is intense and admirable. This prototype is like a good scenario in that it functions in the liminal zone between the plausible and implausible, allowing us to consider options and problems (and their solutions) that otherwise we would be blind to.

I can see some elements of this prototype finding their way into urban hyper-density new-build apartments, and when they do it will be fair to say the “futures thinking” was done here, in this project.
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