A Network for Customizable + Reconfigurable Housing

The housing industry of today produces homes that are poorly prepared for the future. Rapidly changing demographics and related societal pressures will inevitably transform the home into a center for preventative health care, distributed energy production, work, learning, and communication requiring us to rethink how we design and integrate technology into our places of living. In addition, people have a powerful desire for their places of living to reflect individual needs and values. The current housing development process, however, discourages innovation and produces mostly low-grade, generic commodities. It cannot efficiency respond to the unique requirements of individual occupants. We propose a strategy that may enable ∗Authors names are listed in alphabetical order. †This work was done by Deva Seetharam and H. Shrikumar while they were at the MIT Media Laboratory. customized, cost-effective, high performance housing solutions. In this paper, we present essential concepts for a building network that is necessary to fully realize these goals. We present the initial implementations of building network called GSG 1.0 and c@t, a language for programming distributed embedded systems such as large-scale building networks.