The Future Home: Innovative Design for Human and Plant Cohabitation: February 2008

Statement

We are a design lab based in Joshua Tree, California. Our purpose is to:
1) Look at plants as technology but from a human and creative perspective
2) Pursue the potential many plant species have for removing toxins and adding moisture to the breathing zones in our homes, offices, clinical spaces, and commercial spaces.
3) Encourage the co-habitation of plants and humans.
4) Increase the appeal of incorporating plants into our living spaces by applying good, sustainable design principles to existing methods of keeping houseplants.
5) Personalize the breathing zones of individuals based on their environmental health concerns such as benzene or formaldehyde exposure.
6) Re-imagine the kitchen’s tea cupboard and spice rack as a living resource.
7) Re-imagine the bathroom’s medicine cabinet as a living resource offering safer, lasting, fresher, and more holistic alternatives to many of the commercial items that are conventionally stocked in medicine cabinets at home.
8) Critically engage the ways in which plants can be used for aesthetic purposes in interior design.

In this pursuit we are currently developing the following design lines:
“Sustainable Air Filtration”
“Sustainable Humidity Maintenance”
“Living Medical Resource”
“Living Kitchen Resource”
“Built-In and Mobile Terrarium Installations”
“Interior Desert-scaping”

Monday, February 11, 2008

The yurt is down...

The sun went away and the winds picked up. The yurt survived a brutal windstorm in the night and in the morning we made the tension ring stronger and put it back in place from where it had shifted on-site. Feeling the gusts pick up above 45 mph, we went to the hardware store for ropes and sandbags to tether it down using the surrounding low railing. Then there it was, haven been blown like a rocket several hundred feet and crashed into some evergreen trees. No witnesses came forward to tell of the spektacle: the silver hexagonal yurt hovering above the college art center--lifted like a true UFO.
The insulation boards, my body, and my wonderful shifting 'team' have now been tested under extreme weather conditions. I wrote a new set of laws tofollow for phase 2.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

The yurt is up!

The hexayurt (made exlusively of Thermax insulation board, duct tape, and foil tape) has been constructed on the lawn of the arts center at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. It is already beginning to look like a a safe pod for a future inhabitant on the run from contaminated, unsafe areas. It is being tested under rain and snow for at least the next ten days.
You can be expecting to see pictures soon.

Coming up Soon:
1) The "Future Scenario" narrative based on extrapolations of the ways in which we do things today (social, political, and economic behavior patterns), technological development, and how the human body and everything else responds to human activities. The narrative is also based on imagery from dream and meditation and futurist novels, stories, comics, Manga, films, video games, and art.
2) Video: "Newsfeeds From the Future!"