Our home is a narrative system. To develop effective speculative design strategies we must understand the relationship between design, meaning, and use. To cultivate sustainable systems we must consider how any specific design requires a shift in habits that can be constantly impacted by changing externalities.

As part of the Culture Mapping workshops I share with students and clients, we map these evolving meanings to understand how our design must anticipate changes that provide better investments and direction of resources.

By mapping the evolution of our design as a system of language we can uncover narrative codes. Our homes offer a corpus of language embedded in the evolving design of how we live. The concept of “a machine for living” today is something quite different than it was after WW2. Our desire to be closer to food systems is one obvious example. Today’s “machine for living” is a home that learns and adapts to a changing world with fewer resources and an increasing ambiguity between home and other spaces in our world.

#culturemapping #home #designthinking #semiotics #speculativedesign #foresight