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I came across this blog today in my travels (http://homeappliances.wordpress.com/). I thought it was interesting to see such a comprehensive collection of photographs of new home technologies.
The organisation of the blog was also useful as you could look at a collection of photographs of one particular technologies.
I also thought it was interesting that the aim of the blog was to help make people’s lives easier
On Thursday, we had the privilege of attending a class given by Dr Stefan Meisiek. In this class we were asked to think about presenting our ideas rather than representing them. Stefan asked us to do this by modelling our ideas with oddments such as foam, wood, cardboard, paper, glue, fabric and magazines.
The first task he asked us to perform was to present Melbourne.
Here is our vision of Melbourne:
As you can see, it is quite literal, simply a three-dimensional map of Melbourne. However, Stefan did like the lateral thinking behind the emphasis placed on the steps of Flinders Street Station. We saw this as a central meeting point, and so, decided to make it larger.
We missed the middle of the class, however, we returned in time to make a presentation of the idea for our final outcome.
Here it is:
We showed two different houses, showing that different people have different tastes in technologies. In each house, we represented the notion of choice, by making each product in the home able to flip up, revealing other products that the person had chosen from. The star and money symbol represent the idea that there will be information shared in our final product, hence these items being in the middle. The pink fabric represented the overarching theme of Old vs New.
It was nice to get a chance to use our hands, and just have a free thinking session, as I feel that sometimes we tend to box ourselves into ideas without having the chance to explore them.
My portion of the literature review focused largely on the non-use of new technologies by the elderly. However, a new development has been created in Japan specifically for the elderly.
Image taken from http://www.livenews.com.au/
Above is an image of the airbag for the elderly, to prevent them from injuring themselves when they fall over. Not quite the development I was hoping for, in honesty. Let’s see if it takes off!
The story can be viewed in its entrirety at Live News.
It seems like it’s home season! All the newspapers are running stories on home renovation, furnishings, etc. Target and other department stores are having huge sales on homewares.
Here are some interesting articles on the home.
The first is from The Age‘s M magazine. It describes homes with automation, such as Bill Gates’s house where the paintings and music changes according to who opens the door. It also describes some ‘failed’ home technologies that didn’t take off, such as the Internet fridge. Very interesting – it’s amazing how much programming could, in theory, be present in the home of the future. The article makes the point of pondering what would happen if the computer crashed and the homeowners lacked the skills to fix it. Is the home of the future one where we are so utterly reliant on technology? And is that really what people want? This is just one thing we hope to uncover through our research.
The second is a short article from The Age‘s Good Weekend, describing how to make the most of small seemingly unusable spaces. The interesting point I gleaned from the article, though, is that the bathroom is the last remaining single-use space in many homes, and even then, many people I know have CD players, etc. in their bathrooms, turning it into a room for entertainment, and not one simply for grooming and hygiene. Perhaps the home of the future is not one in which we cram every room with as much technology as possible, and rely completely on technology to run our lives. Perhaps the home of the future is one in which technology is pared back. As noted in our literature review: “Will the home of the future be packed full of technology that is only accessible by early adopters, or will we start to see a shift from feature-packed technology to a more user-centred technology; one that focuses on doing one thing, and doing it well, so that it fits in perfectly with other technologies.” Could this be true of the way we will treat the rooms in our house as well?
