Future Living
IIT institute of Design Structured Planning
IIT institute of Design Structured Planning
Structured Planning is one of the courses the Institute of Design is famous for. Developed by Professor Chuck Owen, I was lucky enough to take this workshop the last time he taught it before retiring. Structured Planning is an involved and meticulous method of design that is painful to do but it is an excellent way to solve big, ambiguous problems. Like ours for example.
Our problem was: what is the future of housing? We had to look at the problem through multiple lenses. A team of 40 of us broke into sub-teams working on every aspect of housing, from biological support systems to construction, sexual intimacy and privacy, eating, waste disposal and recycling, leisure and even community and governance.
The results are summarized in these posters but resulted in a 400 page report outlining a vision of future housing that is smaller, more urban, more resource-efficient, with living bio-walls, rainwater reclamation, ambient security systems, even shared garden robots that remove pet waste from the yard.
The project won us a Bronze International Design Excellence Award in the Student Category in 2010. It is one of the projects at ID I am most proud of.
