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Reconfigurable, Modular Dream Home
ssyladin writes: "CNN is reporting a new dream cyber home being designed by the Brits for use in Hong Kong. It combines smart home technologies of touch panels for lights, heating, water taps, with the ability to move the interior wall partitions around with a basic toolbox and about a half day of labor. No more LAN parties in the garage! The homes can also be built faster and with less waste too. Bit skimpy on the details, but its an exciting prospect if its ever finished." Concepts like this probably fill a lot of napkin doodles around the world -- what do you think this particular one should do differently?
"You can control your temperature of the flat, you can control lighting," said Donald Hughes with the Hong Kong Housing Society.
...
Just imagine
Wait a minute. That sounds like a cubicle. 'Cubicle' and 'dream cyber home' do not belong in the same article, ok, guys?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When do we get this here? (NJ/US)
[o]_O
I dunno...I wouldn't want to buy a house designed by a company with a name like "The Integer Group"...sounds limiting.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
How is that possible?
I thought the web browser was an inseparable part of the home.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
I wrote the webmaster a little note and he responded that the videos cost money and can only be seen by subscribers. I wrote a note back saying that under Mozilla/Linux I don't even see the popup that gives me an option to subscribe, and he never wrote back.
Talk about clueless. It's the webmaster's job to make sure his site works. It plainly doesn't. The name is cnn.com, not cnnforwindows.com!
I wrote another note to BMW because their site doesn't work either. I wrote that people who demand the most out of their cars buy BMW, and people who demand the most out of their computers use Linux, and asked him nicely to support Linux. He wrote back and said he'd think about it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
To me, that does not sound like a dream home, it sounds more like Ubiquitous version of the dream house featured in the movie Cube.
Being that everything in the house is electronic, what happens in the event of a blackout? Usually the first action is to turn off everything that was on -- but an electronic switch prevents that. How would you get water from the taps (or worse, shut it off)?
I hope the door and window locks aren't electronic, too.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
"You can control the Integer house.." - link
Cameras (evidently dark right now in Hong Kong) - link
I wish I could read more about the thing, but the pages aren't loading and it looks like we're going to burn it down!
Does this remind anyone of the old houses of the future? I have a robot book from the early '80s with this strange modular, domed modules that were supposed to be the computer-controlled home of the future. Now that it is the future (as far as I can tell,) I'd like to know what's substantially different about this idea compared to homes of the future twenty years ago.
Though I do like the name (the Integer Group.)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
by Rex Roberts. Published by M.Evans, 1964.
You'll never look at houses the same and his interior walls don't even necessarily need tools to move. Heck some of them aren't even technically walls although a stranger couldn't even tell.
This book should be required reading for anyone intending to build a house, especially architects.
KFG
I have long dreamed of this becomming widely available and accepted.
However, in talking about it among friends and collegues, I realized that most women will *not like it*.
It is too clinical and "same-same". Girls want something that makes them feel "special". If everyone has the same panels and boxes, then it will become a status symbol to have something *different*.
And we all know that:
Status_Symbol != Convenience
Table-ized A.I.
Ack! Dont tell my wife! She will want that! I can see it now....
Honey can you move this wall over here? Then that wall over there and then this over there?
Later that week...
Honey can you move that wall back over there? Maybe this wall over here?
I can already hear my own screams.....
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
First off: they're using a stylus for the main control panels? Does the designer of this brilliantly planned system use salad tongs to throw light switches in his current house or something?
"You can control your temperature of the flat, you can control lighting..."
Hey, they're onto something here! A method for controlling lighting--patent it while it's hot, lads! And controlling the temperature of one's flat? Sheer brilliance! Can I do all of this with the same stylus, as well??
"If you have a party, and want to control your music sound, you would basically be able to press [a few central] switches instead of walking around the whole flat."
Well hell, looks like I should have held off on buying that "Walk around my whole flat" stereo control system. Of course, I still get a good workout when setting the equalizer...
"The Internet fridge"
I stopped reading the article right here. Anything that talks about the Internet Fridge is doomed to failure. It's like the Goodwin's Law for overuse of technology.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
You come back from the store to discover that your kids remade the house into a giant giraffe.
Table-ized A.I.
You probably have to patch your home and rebuild it before you can install that bidet module. I don't think many consumers would go for that.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
.. like crown molding? I guess if you're into that, but I can't imagine the walls looking anything but like an office building.
Not to mention I wouldn't want to give my wife the option of changing the size of the rooms; rearranging the furniture is enough of a hassle
Live web cams
I do wonder about the material cost to produce some of these electronics -- but, honestly, I don't really know what that cost is. My impression is that CRTs are the worst offenders among typical computer parts, but even circuitry is fairly environmentally costly (mostly using large amounts of water to manufacture, and perhaps requiring raw minerals who's mining is environmentally damaging).
I am not completely sure about HK, but in Japan, it seems that houses are rarely renovated, as in the US, but much more frequently torn down and rebuilt altogether. Some people blame it on the "bad taste" of the previous owners and their funky designs of the house, and then build some funky design themselves.
Is situations like that -- when the interior can be EASILY re-configured, you bet it would be much more efficient. It would also have the added advantage of being able to just create a room for, say a baby.
I mean, the alternatives are shoddy at best: most interior partitions people built themselves are not exactly fire-code compliant; and have people come in and actually do professional work costs a CHUNK of cash. have ceiling-high configuable walls would be a dream! i am just worried about the wall strength (kids running into them), acoustic damping (sex in the next room), and plumbing (probabbly harder to wire than electrical, no?)...
otherwise I am all for it.
p.s. there has always been talks of "modular apartments" and the such. I am really kind of disappointed that they havn't show up more often. but this is a good direction
My life in the land of the rising sun.
it's called Manufactured Housing, although most people know them by their slang name, Trailer Homes.
Seriously.
You can get Single, Double, and Triple-wide manufactured homes, and I've even seen two story setups (I used to pass a ton of these "dealerships" on my way to college each day). The basic concept is not unique, but it also isn't stupid: I seem to recall a number being quoted as about 1/3 the cost to assemble as a "custom" home (which makes sense, as these are essentially produced on an assembly line). Take modular pieces, assemble together, call it a day. No different than cubicles or the Habitrails you built for your hamster as a kid.
Is it a bad idea? I would say not at all. No one smirks at the build quality or luxury of a Mercedes Benz or BMW, but they're just as assembly line built as, say, a Kia (or Yugo or whatever). Assuming modular housing could succesfully target itself at the lower-end of the new home market, people would get a lot more house (and in a lot of cases, a better built house) than they do from the "custom" market (custom in quotations because that market is essentially nothing but cookie-cutter tract homes where housewives get to feel important because they paid $500 extra to change the color of the walls in the living room).
Stop and think about it: In Houston, which has probably the cheapest real-estate market of any major city, $100,000 gets you a stripped-down ~2,200 sq. ft. house about 30 miles from downtown. No fancy garden bathtub/jacuuzi, no structured wiring system for a house-wide network, no faux marble countertops, and shitty carpet with shitty padding. That same $100,000 could go a hell of a long way on modular housing. It needn't be a trailer home dumped on a slab; a simple arrangement of modular wall pieces available in multiple sizes and completely assembled using steel, insulation, and wallboard would be, as far as I'm concerned, just as good as one pieced together from raw materials by 6 guys who know what the hell they're doing and 40 guys who were picked up from the immigrant labor force at the 7-11 that morning.
I once worked for a subcontractor, and I needed to run some wiring through a colum that was in the kitchen area. Knowing that the wiring I was running was quite large, and would require a 3/4" hole in a 1 1/2" piece of wood, I asked the construction foreman whether or not the pillar was load-bearing. He replied, "how the hell should I know, ask the guys who made the blueprints" and returned to whatever it was he was doing. I vowed right then never to buy a home made by that particular company.
I would say that the company that can figure out the proper configuration system and negotiate contracts with the entry-level tract-home builders would be a profitable company indeed.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
(Uh, remove the space in the above link. The comment editor won't let me put in a continuous URL. Sorry . .
How Buildings Learn is amazing. Fun to read, persuasive, and rousing. It looks at building designs that work (e.g., MIT's ugly, rambling wooden lab and office structure, Building 20) and those that don't (e.g., MIT's Media Lab building, very modern and all but not given to easy adaption.
Stefan
Wait until Steve Jobs gets a hold of this...
Dear God I hope not. I don't want to take a shower in a translucent bathroom.
Table-ized A.I.
"How"?
"You know all those unsold floor-to-ceiling movable office partititions we have in the warehouse?"
"Yeah, and we've got another ten acres worth coming back from the WorldCom bankruptcy. Nobody's fitting out office space right now. What do you want to do with them?"
"Let's team with a builder to build house shells and use the partitions as interior walls in homes. It'll be cheaper than regular construction. And homeowners will be able to reconfigure; add a bedroom for a new kid, open it up when the kids leave.
"That will never fly; house buyers are too traditional".
"Maybe if we had a sales gimmick... Let's call it a "modular cyber house".
"What's "cyber" about office partitions?"
"We'll throw in a home control system. We've got lots of commercial building automation parts in the warehouse too."
"Well, maybe. But we need a design for a house. Just a big shell, but modern-looking".
"Just build a big round roof, and frame it with stock glass and metal exterior panels. That'll be cheap to build. It'll look like those old '50s designs from that Fuller guy. And prices are really low on exterior panels right now."
"This could work out. Let's draw up some renderings of what it would look like and get some press. Even if it doesn't work out, maybe we can do a bulk sell on the partitions to some homebuilder."
Its funny to look at houses that were built in the 80's and see integrated gadgets like intercom system, central-vac, and B&W security cameras that probably cost a fortune back then yet do nothing for their sale price today.
The name is cnn.com, not cnnforwindows.com!
Ironic, that this is the same company that owns Netscape.
Mmmm.. Donuts