Chuck Owen was a legend. He was a engineer by training and a designer at heart. He was a student of Buckminster Fuller, and he developed a design method called Structured Planning. Structured Planning is designed to tackle really large complex problems, like how to improve access to the justice system for poor and minorities. In this, the last class in Structured Planning, we tackled the home of the future: what would a new home look like in the near future taking into account climate change and limited resources? I was part of a team of 40, that included architects, designers, engineers, ethnographers and psychologists. We looked at multiple aspects of home life:

• Biological Systems

• Water

• Air quality

• Security

• Energy

• Education

• Food and Food preparation

• Space

• Storage

• Community

• Appliances

• Relationships (including sex and intimacy)

• Entertainment

• Health & Hygiene

• Waste

• Pets

• Leisure

The house had unique features: a modular design that could be added to, bio-walls that could grow fresh vegetables, and a wing on the roof with movable solar panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity.

The outputs of this huge project were a presentation of 270 slides, a written document of 400 pages, an appendix of 326 pages, and 2 posters that summarized the project. In it, we anticipated several technologies that have since made it to market:

• Anti-microbial coatings

• Self-healing surfaces

• Smart refrigerators

• Robotic lawnmowers

• Robotic pet waste removers

• Bio-walls

The project was submitted for an International Design Excellence Award (Industrial Design Society of America) and it took home a Bronze Award.

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