Design: Home for Life
Here’s something I put together with SketchUp about six months ago. It’s a home that can be built and expanded over time as a family grows, prospers, has kids, has parents move in, gets old and ultimately hands it off.
Key design considerations:
- Modular. In lieu of a starter home, You can build just the bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and closet first. A modern “cabin” for two telecommuters. That expands to include more bedrooms, office space, amenities (pool, garden, garage etc) as necessary for children. More for additional families or parents that come live with you.
- View centric. Partly given this is a thought exercise/goal, the entire house is designed to maximize view points for a large lake or ocean. Ideally this would be placed on a couple dozen acres of your own.
- Out(in)doors. Blur the line. Life’s too short for walls alienating you from your land.
- Multifamily living. This could be multigenerational. Parents as they retire come live. As the economy blows up, kids who can’t find work, or even those who stick around by choice. Shared functions are great, but take privacy not account.
Use case:
- Invest $150,000 in what’s basically a vacation home and land. You live, work, build your career elsewhere. Visit when you can. Send a set of keys to everyone you love to do the same.
- Invest in $50,000 increments to add bedrooms, offices, extra bathrooms, amenities, productive infrastructure (energy, food, water, protection). Gradually spend more time here until paying rent doesn’t make financial sense.
- Do as much of the work yourself as possible. What you can’t, purchase prefabbed. Know how everything works, and how to fix it.
- Live. Permaculture your land, hydro/aero-ponics inside, aquaponics your pool. Have friends and family live with you for extended periods. Help them build their own homes in your enclave. Continue to work on a global scale, but embrace you and yours.
Design: Modernist Chair
As I work on MiiU, I am thinking visually on a variety of problems. All share the goal of building stuff in a cheap, locally produceable, DIY way.
In particular, I’m trying to marry this to the modern aesthetic I find inspiring (through the use of discipline). Also, a modern aesthetic is great for those interested in resilient production, because clean lines are easier for amateurs to execute.
In this case I consider the chair. This is a simple metal frame any self respecting welder can put together, along with a simple foam cushion, wrapped in stitched blue fabric. Cost? Maybe $50. Depends on the availability of the right metal parts.
Note: This can be dressed with a rich wood arm rest on each arm.
On Concentration
For the first time in a long time, I am concentrating. That is, instead of spending 12 hours per day jumping from the interesting to the new, diving very deep into a wide variety of information streams, and taking a shot at every idea that comes through, I’m focusing on a finite and particular problem set for those hours everyday.
It’s very different. Requires some rethinking and discipline (and coffee). And further complicated by the fact that I now share a home and am the one that stays at home. This involves prioritization as well. In short, checklists.
Not just todo lists, but prioritized, time assigned lists that are as specific as possible. Why? Spending ten minutes thinking it through and getting it out of your head means you waste less of your cognitive power later, figuring it out or backtracking from missteps. You can deliberately get things done. And mark your progress.
Of course, if you stick to the checklist (best trick is to enjoy the multiple checkmarks as you go down), you’ll spend less time interacting with people. Less social media, less phone calls, definitely less in person interaction. It’s an almost eery loneliness. The noise of the global information network that grew comforting has suddenly blinked out.
Get a great, varied soundtrack. And when you do get to interact with someone, make it someone worth it, and concentrate on that the same way as if it were on your list. Don’t multitask, (obviously, don’t try to script out a conversation). Add your entertainment and workouts as well.
Of course, you can go too far with this, too regimented a life is detrimental to your personal relationships. Get productive to the point where you can be spontaneous guilt-free. (Though I have found that if you’re only concerned with yourself, a highly regimented life yields productivity and opportunity.)
Software that helps:
StayFocusd. It blocks sites of your choosing on your browser for a time you set. Originally set it to one hour per day for news sites, Reddit, social. That drove me nuts so I expanded to two hours.
A checklist app that works across your phone, computer, her phone, and online. I haven’t found the best one, but Wunderlist works for now. It doesn’t handle repeat tasks and there’s no scorecard.
Here’s how the right app would work.
Considering softshelter Slums
The softshelter project is “a system for creating personal space within a larger shelter area in order to provide individuals and families with a sense of privacy and encourage community-building in the days following a disaster.”
Let’s put aside for a moment technical questions like are these kraft paper and felt walls fireproof, can they be adapted to dealing with invasive biology, etc.
The envisioned use case is the Superdome after Katrina. Temporary refugees that need to be organized and stored while the cavalry mobilizes and arrives. But consider the softshelter in a context where help never or is very late in coming.
This is a scenario where soft actually becomes a harm rather than a good. A community whose spatial existence is defined by these over the course of years? I shudder at the thought of the intentional lack of specific, delineated space coupled with fluid and violence/hoarding based social structures.
Further, even in a temporary context (days to months), the softshelter generates privacy. Revisiting the Superdome, is privacy a good to be valued in temporary housing within an autonomous zone (that is, free of any dominant force)? Or does it lend itself to the grotesque – rape rooms, loot storage, armories?
LiquidText = TangibleText
Very cool. Looks like LiquidText is turning my TangibleText idea into reality.
Note: I post business/product ideas from my notebook pretty regularly. (Mostly because I don’t have the time to pursue them, and also because it’s nice to see them validated.) Have a pretty good track record of being about a year or two ahead.