The Future Home: Innovative Design for Human and Plant Cohabitation: Project Updates

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”

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Project Updates

This table was made out of an extra triangle of insulation board. There is a wood support in the middle. It cannot hold much weight, but is a great design for the interior of the yurt because it maximizes table space without obscuring the wall space which will be covered shortly in drawings, typed posters of the future scenario, and image collages/montages.

These are developing Lion's Main mushrooms. THe moisture kept in the yurt creates an ideal growing condition for mushrooms. Once the first generation of mushrooms is harvested, the mycelium left in the bag will be used to remove toxins from soil used in the terrariums. What I am describing is a potentially closed-loop system of maintaining a toxin-free home environment. The worm compost creates soil which is treated by the mycelium (which produce consumeable mushrooms for food), the rainwater is collected in gutters made out of plastic-lined cardboard edges I salvaged from dumpsters that were once used as a packing material for photocopy machines, the rainwater is treated and detoxified by the aquatic and wetland plants, the water in turn is used on the mushrooms and terrarium plants, and the plant terrariums feed on this remediated soil and water---a process that perpetually and sustainably filter toxins out of the air. All of these steps are important parts of the environmental maintanance systems that improve environmental and human health today and are necessary for survival in the scenario for 2150.