Keywords

FormalPara Interviewees

  • Soulaima Gourani

  • Sandrine Joseph

  • Tshering Lama

  • Mokena Makeka

  • Christian Mandl

  • Claudia Vergueiro Massei

  • Lisa Witter

The home should be the treasure chest of living.—Le Corbusier

What will the homes look like in which our families will live in the future?

According to the OECD report, the homes of the future will be more and more connected to the region’s power grid, will be flexibly designed, will implement advanced technologies for heating and security, and will even make automatic decisions about post offices (The Future of families to 203, 2012).

“Futurology: A New Home in 2050” on behalf of the National House Building Council Foundation, which conducted research that tried to predict housing advices three decades ago and also predicted radical changes in home design due to new technologies and population mobility as well as taking climate change into account (NHBC Foundation, 2018). The introduction suggests that demographic changes, such as the rapid increase in the elderly population, exacerbate the problem of young people who cannot leave their homes and may intensify the demand for housing for different generations. Multiple homes are designed with flexible floor plans that are suitable for different generations and can adapt to changing family needs. Encouraged by the elevated necessity of urban living in by now compact populated regions, future projects will create houses with less space but more floors with open balconies and open roof areas. Architects take creative imagination impulses from rather compact designs like boats or mobile homes to create extra “micro-cantered” habitats for singles. Further innovative measures are being taken to design “third-age” accommodation for over 65s who meet the requirement of elevator housing, equal access, and social events while maintaining privacy and property. By 2050, technology will turn homes into collectors, and then electricity from nonfossil power source is likely to heat our homes and water. Electric vehicles will be widely available, and each habitat will have a charging station.

The future house will control its energy consumption via a central control panel that combines heating, electricity consumption, ventilation, and car charging. As energy efficiency becomes more important, the ideas currently used in the workplace are becoming standard for homes, e.g., allowing noncore devices to automatically shut off when the amperage is highest. The mailboxes are replaced by smart mailboxes that can accept registered mail and store valuable parcels. The homes of the future must respond to climate change by improving rapid cooling and heating technologies. Smart homes can monitor the health and activities of residents, for example, by reminding them to take medication or warning them of boiling water or overflowing bathrooms. Town houses will be connected to district heating and energy networks via the district’s energy center, which will generate heat from waste or earth sources. Country houses will even have more space—in other words, more options for generating solar energy through integrated technology, which means that the roof itself is a solar collector and not, as was previously the case, a plate attached to the roof. Over the next 30 years, we will see significant changes in family life due to technological advances in response to social, demographic, and climate change. The fact that houses have to be adapted to these requirements is a good way to protect yourself from surprises.

The futurological concept of an interactive smart home of the future includes individualization—the programming of the entire interior of living space, furniture, household, and technical devices according to the new achievements of the twenty-first century. The project of the house includes a robot kitchen, a home office with virtual capabilities, a bedroom with a module, a bathroom with an augmented reality simulation ball, a living room—a digital portal for communication, a multimedia—play center for the whole family (OECD, 2011).

At the end of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of smart devices will actively enter our homes and everyday lives. Robotic vacuums, multifunctional electric stoves, multimedia televisions, programmable refrigerators, and computers—a variety of devices are already in our homes, which was unthinkable 30 years ago. Those have appeared and have filled our lives, created a new style, and changed millions of families’ behavior, ideas, and lives. It is time that architects and designers not only consider all the new smart devices in their future projects and install them in our homes as a kind of fashionable high-tech exoticism at the request of customers but also try out the overall concept of looking at the future home from a new perspective.

The architectural and functional idea of the “Interactive House” (Bloomberg, 2015) is already very present and will develop and enter every home very soon. The era of design is already over, when our houses were static and quiet, had the same esthetics, functionality and conservative spirit, and did not change for many generations and decades. The dynamics of life and the rapid scientific and technological progress dictate a different approach to the design of the architectural space of the future house as a kind of constantly updated and restarted lifestyle program and constantly expanding functionality. In my opinion, the future house should become an interactive living environment where the rooms themselves, walls, furniture, decorative materials, and household appliances should be interactive. In addition, the most crucial point is that the future houses should be self-cleaning (even dust should be cleaned automatically every 2–3 h) and maintained (Even the dishes should be washed automatically; by this, I also mean putting them in the dishwasher). You will think I am only a lazy woman, but I tell you, I have only a very practical thinking brain. Together, this will create a type of living space of the future, which can be flexibly and subtly adapted to by the owner, depending on her/his needs, preferences, living standards, technical possibilities, and social programs for living in the house. A house that meets the owners’ wishes and is sensitive at the level of its sensors, radars, engineering systems, various computer programs, transformable forms, changeable styles, voice commands, and recognition—identification of its owner, memory of its tastes, and preferences—will create a comfortable living environment on a new level (Austin, 2019).

Virtual reality and robotics will be actively combined with the mentioned features in the living environment of the future house and will build a living environment in which appliances will be complexly integrated into the single home network as well as in the global net. Walls, floors, and ceilings will change depending on the residents’ emotional moods. The functional program of the premises, in fact, will be large customizable tablets and screens that change their lighting, color, intensity, and saturation; simulate different textures; reproduce any digital three-dimensional images; and monitor the position and location of the person in the moment. A resident of the house will be able to quickly change the emotional mood, the type of decoration, and the situation at any time and even restart the selected program for the operation of the premises online.

The engineering and technical idea of my “Interactive House of the Future” (Jantzen, n.d.) is to organize a local home network in which the information communication between all elements of the interior, exterior of the house, its household appliances, technical systems, and the person(s) (user) should be reached. In addition, the exchange of information in such a local home network can take place at the request of the owner(s) and with other similar systems from neighboring houses, which will be/may be combined into a single scalable network, as well as in interaction with the resources of the global Internet, which pumps the necessary information to the home server. Over time, home programming technologies will become significantly more complex; the variability of settings will increase significantly; the amount of information and the data transfer rate will change exponentially. This will result in the quality and comfort of the living environment. The house will become a habitual, constantly updating feature with unlimited resource intensity, and the residents of the house—users—will eventually get only augmented reality to see what they want to, and the response time to their information request will be instant.

A multimedia player center for the whole family at home will be usual. Already nowadays, joint playlists and film lists on Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc. are common for families and are supported and promoted with family packages (cheaper).

The multifunctional room of a residential building will be at the same time a home cinema, a fitness room, a computer game room, a place for leisure and entertainment, an intellectual and educational center, and a 3D home cinema for all family members (Nambiar, 2021). This will be from today’s point of view a multimedia computer gaming center, where instead of ordinary tables and chairs with gaming monitors the family members/players sit motionless in virtual reality for hours. It should organize the game as well as possibly the life in a virtual room with the effect of dynamic physical stress of the entire body of the user/player. Maybe we will wear special playsuits, 3D reality helmets, interactive toys, and various attributes specially designed for these devices, but I think that the technology will advance so that we will have every functionality with minimum physical components. A diverse database of life situations as well as computer games and powerful processors will enable you to select and customize any situation you like, as well as to set the rules for collective or individual actions/games.

In a room, the walls will be huge panorama screens that use various special effects to reproduce a large-format real-lifelike spectacle. The illuminated, changeable floor tracks the movements of the players in the room like a huge touch pad. The ceiling with dynamic lighting will be able to redirect the light and will have sensors that record noises, smells, and air flows. In general, this will be a type of “gamer gym” where all the bodies and senses of a person will be involved in the game called real life.

Nowadays, advanced children often do not have the opportunity to play with their parents; they hide, lock themselves in their rooms, skip school, run from home to Internet clubs, etc. so that they are not scolded or seen by their parents as they are interacting in virtual environment. With this architectural solution, after some years, conflicts of interest and hobbies of different generations can be avoided; the game can be turned from a separating factor to a connecting factor—a real useful pleasure for all family members as well as their guests.

The kitchen has traditionally been a special place in the house, where, above all, the high-tech solutions and innovations appeared last couple of decades that made the hard monotonous work of the homemakers easier and more interesting. The industrial production of gas stoves began only in 1836 (Snodgras, 2004), the first refrigerator for the household appeared in 1926 (Higgins, 2001), and in 2005, the first social robots “Wakamaru” from Mitsubishi came on the market (Keiper, 2008).

In the future, the kitchen will remain a high-tech room where intelligent furniture with various automatic settings of food storage temperature, humidity, and ventilation mode to consider the various esthetic properties of the outer surface will be cooking autonomy in smart ovens, microwave, etc. still living place for manual cooking, which will be considered very special and expensive. To create any culinary mood according to a recipe broadcast on the Internet will be used. Kitchen 3D printers with commercial cartridges of edible pastes and powders will be a standard built-in option in kitchen appliances. The robot au pair can do many monotonous working tasks, from washing up to cutting salads. The house owners only will be required to give orders to the household robot and monitor the technological processes as the “system administrator.” For low-income customers, there may even be the possibility of renting robots.

Bathrooms with mixed or augmented reality simulation spheres will also be our future. For the bathroom of an interactive home, a special bathtub that can be built into any room with a separate functional module will be invented and developed.

The idea of the simulator’s bathing sphere is that the user not only takes a traditional bath and swims in it but immerses himself in a different reality with numerous special effects. Thanks to computer control, it will be able to simulate, for example, the sea with all the characters from the deep sea displayed on the inner spherical screen, imitating its full presence thanks to mixed reality supported by the selected computer program for a specific session. The user will be able to adjust the temperature of the water, its composition (with or without sea salt), the accompanying sounds, and so on. Virtual reality projection will help to reproduce a realistic three-dimensional image of the expected environment. The water will reduce the weight of the human body, and thanks to the massage effect and touch and temperature interaction, the whole feeling of being in the open sea will be possible to reach.

The futuristic design will be corresponded by the climate-neutral construction, so the bathroom will be made of a new composite material that is durable and easily takes on any design shape. The future bath will have such a strong relaxing and healing effect on the users’ entire body and psyche that a traditional shower will seem like child’s play of the past. But more importantly, this bathroom’s function will be not so much to wash a dirty body but to remove the psychological stress that have accumulated during the day and to gain new vitality. Additionally, the used water in these bathrooms will have a cleaning device, allowing usage of the same water more than 100 times (e.g., loss of water molecules during cleaning approximately 1%).

The living room will become a digital portal for communication. The traditional living room has always been considered a place for receiving guests; holding important events; and active communication with family, friends, and relatives. In the house of the future, it will become a universal space, more like a virtual digital portal. Thanks to the latest digital technologies, it will be possible to simulate communication with both living relatives and guests who are far away, and thanks to digital immortality technology, even the digital counterparts of your deceased relatives will be simulated, for example, meeting a deceased great-grandfather who will toast to your health. During big family vacations, you will be able to order a holographic concert by a digitized Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or any pop star, who will appear in full size right in your living room during a party and play the piano or sing a song (but only if you remembered to pay for your Internet contract).

The living room will be a modern space for visualization shows, a room with projection screens of a new generation in which you can simulate any of your emotional moods. After digitizing the personality of a loved one, you can project your virtual twin image onto the wall screen and thanks to three-dimensional reality do everything with it. We will be able to control our digital avatar twin from the couch, who flies through the storm clouds with virtual reality (already advanced, so no glasses and remote control needed). Furthermore, the loyal robot dog next to us will protect the emotional mood of its owner and synchronize the software skills’ mood like a running processor on four legs. The panels used on the windows will be able to turn in the stained glass structures but also become transparent again after switching off and allow light into the living room. The transparency of windows and stained glass throughout the interactive home can also have a day/night lighting program control without curtains or blinds.

The bedrooms will be a resting place with a programmable sleep module. The future home’s bedroom will be the most conservative room in a residential home that changed only minimally in the last centuries. The most comfortable and most relaxing place to sleep was and will be a light-protected elegant canopy with mosquito nets in combination with various down pillows, a robust and thick mattress, and silk blankets. Nevertheless, the bedrooms of the future smart home will be rooms in which we can program to our sleep mood and organize (evoke) useful dreams for our life cycle and rhythm in order to switch the tired subconscious off for rest. The outdated “old-fashioned” beds will be replaced by the programmable capsule modules for sleep, in which you can choose any “avatars” you want to restart and reset the negative emotions accumulated during the day. The sleep modules will have any adjustable humidity and temperature, air conditioning, oxygen supply, and excellent sound isolation or effects for a deep, healthy sleep that will not be dependent on (or interrupted by) scandals from neighbors (if still present) or from the sweltering summer heat. The sleep capsule will be easy to synchronize with a mobile tablet, which will take on the role of a temporary watch assistant and will receive, pick up, and send calls and messages while we sleep. In the sleep module, it will be possible to set any local lightning, listen to relaxing music, and adjust the hardness of the mattress to the weight of the user, and the capsule lid can even change its light transmission. I proclaim a promising new direction in future design—a complete technological and esthetic “hybridization” of furniture and household appliances. Of course, such sleep modules will not be cheap, but their excellent functionality and esthetic variety, the choice of software configuration, and one or two different functional sizes will help consumers optimize their costs. But if we are not talking about sleeping but about sex, which most couples have in bed 80% of the time, this will remain traditionally in bed as we have it today, sort of as a vintage gag and simulating environment, although I think that traditional sex will also change its process and functions in the near and distant future (see Chapter 10).

We are now very familiar with the home office concept (especially after the Corona pandemic), and we all have somehow developed our virtual working skills. In the modern information society, the “remote work” trend was already gaining momentum in 2019 but became very common during the pandemic (Maurer, 2022). The idea of “remote work” appeared in the USA in 1972, and in 1979, the already stable term “flexible workplace” appeared (Weiler Reynolds, 2022), which did not imply the constant presence of workers in the office. For example, the IT industry was employing 25% of remote workers already in 2016, and even several novels, thrillers, and books were published about this phenomenon (Fleischer, 1995; Sims, 2013). The number of freelancers in various industries who want to work from home is also growing. A virtual home office will allow working entirely remotely, without commuting through the city; saving gasoline, without causing traffic jams; and flexibly organizing your creative process. Working with colleagues, customers, and manufacturers in a virtual reality mode, tele-video conferences, and controlling office cyborgs and robots in production far away from home are somehow already possible but will be routine and used daily. Small home robot advisors will help us at our mini-office with excellent skills, handling a large number of orders, finding and processing the information we need, etc. Information directly from the work monitor of the user’s computer in ideal quality will be transferred to the media wall screens of our office or to the company’s remote studio, where customers can examine the fruits of the joint creative work in detail in three dimensions and we can use it to negotiate in virtual 3D conference call mode. Virtual reality will help remote participants in the production process to meet in the digital space and to consider projects of future products in full size without living the house.

It is high technology that gives architects and designers new possibilities and groundbreaking ideas for creativity. The way our apartments will look like in the future will strongly depend on how we can use the new and advanced technology. I am sure that today we are only in the first phase of the information technology and technological revolution. In 50–100 years, the appearance of our houses will change beyond recognition. For the design process to be painless and as efficient as possible, it is necessary today to try to create such complex experimental predictive models of apartments that will help to feel the enormous potential and full depth of future changes in our lives.

1 Input from Interviewees

Soulaima Gourani

Entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker, CEO, and cofounder of Happioh

In the next 50 years, your home will be able to check your health. Fever scanners will be installed in the front door, and every time you go to the lavatory, your excrement will be scanned for diseases—in this way, you will be alerted of any sudden development before your doctor. Also, your toilet will warn you to be careful not to consume too much unhealthy food because you are at risk of developing diabetes.

Sandrine Joseph

Innovation and social responsibility director at Orange

The home in 2050 will be a foyer in the original sense, as it has always been: a place where we can find strength with those we love. This is where the real wealth of humanity lies.

Tshering Lama

Executive chairperson and cofounder of Idea Studio Nepal (ISN)

The future of homes or housing will be automated, flexible, and customizable in layout and (may) be affordable due to ever increasing automation in building and to meet the need for increasing urbanization. Furthermore, majority of the buildings will be “green” and “accessible” for all. However, I believe, in 2050, “Homes” will be a place for where:

  • People will feel safe from all digital intruders.

  • People will connect with “self” and explore meaning.

  • People will experience a sense of belonging.

  • People will search for new “luxury” places within or close to natural environments.

Therefore, many talented Gen Z will choose to live in rural areas, away from urban noises, to be in a place where they can hear their inner voices—in search of finding their “self.”

Mokena Makeka

Chief imagineer, FLOW, Makeka Design Lab, Mdesignworks, and Principal, Dahlberg Advisors

My design philosophy for 2050 and beyond is FLOW, whereby all of architecture must express the Future of Living according to One World principles. One world principles require all current activity to be within the regenerative limits of one world, which is currently not the case. Successful cities and homes of the year 2050 will be defined as engines of circularity, in which Flows are optimized.

Christian Mandl

Managing partner at Neulogy Ventures

By 2050, I wish to see more affordable homes that are energy efficient and smart, built with recyclable materials, and offer flexible layouts for multigenerational living, in gentle density neighborhoods.

Claudia Vergueiro Massei

Head of Executive Office and Transformation, Siemens Motion

I believe the future of homes will include a lot of customization and smart devices to maximize convenience. Especially with the trend of asset sharing and co-living, technology will play a big role to ensure that features such as indoor temperature, lighting, ambient music, art displays, and many others meet the preferences of the individual using the space at a given time.

Lisa Witter

Executive, serial entrepreneur, writer and public speaker, cofounder, and executive chairman of Apolitical

I hope that our dining room table is never replaced. Practical experience will be at a premium, and being together with family and dining together will be even more important. Smart table, family sits, take big breath, synchronicity devices will bring everyone on the same wave length before dining.

I would also like to see a sort of homogamic gadget to bring my kids and grandkids closer, interconnected in a more essential way to my loved ones, family, and friends.