How Technology Can Re-invent Housing Part Two

The future?

Following the first part of the rundown on how new technology could influence housing this week's post compiles a top five - although really there's no "order" as such. In fact, if you look at any sensible list of technologies likely to become commonplace in the next fifty years you'll very quickly see how every industry is likely to be radically altered by the incoming tech. There are game-changing technologies emerging every year - whether you know it or not, change is coming.

Even if you take one example like programmable matter you very quickly see that we are talking about an entirely different way of life - a time when buildings can be re-arranged at the flick of a programmer's keyboard. At that point you see that housing must once again return to the sometimes overlooked and perhaps old-fashioned notion that it's not only the bricks and mortar buildings that matter to our organisations, but the communities we help to shape.

5) A workable application of Augmented Reality
The reason I say a workable application is because if you've got a smartphone you can already download applications that are notionally augmented reality. They overlay information from a database over the real world. Some of the more interesting ones are the star maps that allow you to fake a deep and learned knowledge of the various stars in the sky. For augmented reality to really shape our lives though it needs to be in a much more practical form than holding a smartphone up to the night sky.

Google's Project Glass is probably the best vision of how things could come to pass. In that eventuality - augmented reality is less about housing, and more about how humans as a species can get smarter. If your every glance can be recorded, tagged and searched - what does that do to customer engagement? How does it change the way we deliver information? Moreover - what does it do to our brains?

4) Enhance health in communities
Further to last week's talk of the internet of things, we should probably accept that more of our appliances are going to start offering up information about us. While this has to be approached with the concept of user privacy as a paramount concern, it does offer us a tantalising view of how life could be when our stuff gets smarter. One application of this is in achieving health goals. How about getting an X-box style achievement for using the stairs five times rather than the lift? Or a series of networked pedometers that provide a real-time visualisation of who in a community is winning a race?

3) Teleport staff so we don’t need to have a fleet of vehicles
Travelling is one of the least efficient aspects of running any organisation, we need to utilise all of the technology available to reduce employee miles. Whether it's through a sensible policy of teleworking, video conferencing and smarter logistics - there's a huge amount we can do to save money and the environment.

2) Measure happiness in the community
This is potentially far-fetched but the theory is sound, I think! For a few years now Google has been tracking the movement of flu outbreaks by measuring volumes of flu-related searches and then plotting that across maps (http://www.google.org/flutrends/). This idea of using real-time information on what people are saying is fascinating (although again raises the spectre of privacy issues).

Let's say you could also plug in the information that people were adding to social media networks as well. Then if you could filter those terabytes of information through an algorithm that was sensitive to emotions you could theoretically build up a very detailed model of our communities' levels of happiness. That's a mind-blowing tool when you think about setting up alerts from such a system - where you could get alerts about higher-than-average mentions of ASB. I wouldn't be surprised if you could even start to model crime patterns with a tool like that. What's more you would have another metric that would show you precisely where needed work in terms of emotional support.  

1) Enhance community conversations
THT have been on Facebook and Twitter for over two years now and in that time we've seen just how useful these technologies can be in giving us a platform to host and participate in discussions with our communities. It's not just a case of providing somewhere for these discussions to go on - it's also getting the technology to deliver something more useful from these discussions. We could use keyword extraction to find what's really important to our tenants and alert us to possible problems. Perhaps it's when this sort of conversation is allied with augmented reality that it will really allow us an in-depth and real-time insight into the communities we want to support.

Incidentally, I started thinking about this stuff because it looks like THT is about to be in the market for a new IT system. So I started thinking about what I would want in order to position us for what is coming. A quick look at the systems on the market and I'm struck by how far behind the technology leading (let alone bleeding) edge any of them are. As a sector, are we well served by the products out there? Emphatically not. It's time to up our demands - any willing suppliers out there with a compelling 21st Century offer? You know where to find me....

As a bonus thought, isn't it about time someone thought about a realistic option for cloning? Never mind being in two places at once, I need at least four of me if I'm going to have a chance of keeping up...