The Sensible Home
MARCO SUSANI

I would like to start by proposing a model of home that is perhaps not very innovative. I had some doubts about including this first image because I wanted to avoid forming two parties: the plugged and the unplugged. I didn't want to be taken as one of the nostalgic unplugged, even though I like this thinking, in a way.

The reason that I showed this image of an unplugged home first is that it embodies a certain idea of materiality. Materiality, the physical world around us, is something that I believe we should be concentrating on: we have been dealing with materialities for millions of years and we must attempt to understand our own in order to learn eventually how to deal with a (slight) change in it.

Another thing I like about this image is that it somehow renders tangible the idea of sedimentation, another concept that I feel is very relevant to our present topic. You see nice panda pictures and other nice objects and you can imagine the time and personal involvement it took for this house to become what it is, even though some may not consider it the ultimate home, aesthetically speaking. The issue facing us is: what has happened to this house and to the warm, smelly and very material home it still is? The micro-climate and sense of smell are difficult to reproduce--let's try not to lose sight of them.

Maybe it is not just a choice between being plugged or unplugged. As designers, we are committed to analyse technologies coming into the home and and ultimately to select: to determine which ones we allow into the home and which we keep out. So the issue is how to introduce technologies into the home and make them acceptable; not how to sell them. We must learn to deal with them and be toughly selective--eliminate what we feel does not fit into the home.

This means that we are really trying to do many things at once: to increase the material qualities that we found in that first image and to add something, but without cutting away anything.

T h e . C h a n g i n g . S p a c e . o f . H o m e

What's happening to this home? One thing has already happened and and I'm sure all of you notice it, since you know that TV first intruded into our homes a long time ago. I've heard many descriptions of American families sitting down watching TV. Here, they are sitting down not watching the TV: actually ignoring it, after a fashion. I can imagine the sound that accompanies this image: probably, you hear the sound of the dishes; they are speaking, so you hear the sound of chatting and chewing and so on; they are probably commenting on what the person on TV is saying, maybe criticizing him. Generally speaking, what this image clearly evokes for us is a new hierarchy in the space of the home, because it is in fact difficult to say how many people are present in that room. Is it 3 or 4? The space is changing. Keeping within the material world and its hierarchy, we could definitely say: three. Three people are telling the fourth person that he is stupid, while the fourth is physically far away.

In a sense, this is in harmony with certain theories that describe good technology as technology that disappears. This concept is too sophisticated to explain now, but I agree with it at the most banal level: I like the techniques and the technologies that I don't see, because I don't see the need of seeing them. Perhaps we could claim that the best technologies for the home are the ones that you can eventually ignore, like they are doing. This might be considered a selection criteria for introduction of technologies into the home: we should choose the ones that we eventually can turn off. Another nice thing about this image--maybe it's typically Italian or Mediterranean--is that the TV hasn't succeeded in changing the physical arrangement of the furniture. It has lost the battle with another aspect, namely, the need to have what we Italians call the salotto buono: the nice living room, usually one which you don't even inhabit. However, it must be there, locked, and must contain a sofa with two chairs facing it. So, in many houses in Italy, including the one where I lived with my parents, we had the sofa and two chairs arranged in this way, with the TV on the other side. We sat on the back of the chairs, turned away from the sofa, to watch the TV.

I think this example of how chairs resisted TV reveals an aspect of the physical resistance of the home to the intrusion of media and new technologies. It is a good example of the resistance of the material world to the immaterial or virtual world of communication space.

Continuing with this story, I've made a number of diagrams explaining what has happened to our houses in the last fifty years: they have come to contain an ever-increasing number of objects, some that can be held in one's hand and others that are active. What does this mean? First of all, that the space has been flooded with low-quality objects; the last 50 years brought a lot of almost outright non-useful stuff into our homes, objects related, as one person said, to the pleasure of buying. Now, we've at least arrived at a kind of watershed of possibility, in the sense that we're beginning to suspect that we did something wrong and that perhaps change is needed.

In the case of active objects, it is particularly important that they have not only a physical presence in our space, but that they act and create different hierarchies. This creates an additional problem of organisation of space: it changes according to whether the machines are on and off. We are dealing with a situation with a history of a high quantity of low-quality objects.

As designers, let's speak about the material world: the responsibility for flooding people's houses with junk is partly ours. In the culture of design today, one can perceive the beginnings of an idea that maybe the fault is ours and that we have to do something different.

It is perhaps a bit early for the world of information to propose such a parallel, but what if the same thing happens in the world of information that happened in the material world: a high quantity of low-quality information? How will we deal with this?. I'd like to talk about some of the issues we will face if this happens.

We know that the world of objects is becoming increasingly crowded and its presence increasingly forceful. We also understand that our notion of comfort is changing: in the past, comfort was having more machines and objects. A new idea of comfort is to limit the machine and simply to decide what I want to do and what I want the machine to do.

This is a more delicate approach to deciding what the machine has to do and which machines I want in my home. And the theory or ideal that I propose as a designer of `smart' objects is that designing their shape is not enough--you have to design or limit their behavior. So we start with a `non-progressive' look back, beyond innovation and progress, at our very distant history to see why, with the new machines and technologies, we lack the bond we had with the archetypical tools we began manipulating almost at the beginning of history, tools like the hammer, the scissors and so on.

Could we eventually create a new relationship with the object--a re-creation of our relations with ancient tools? Without adding to the already existing quantity of objects, we could add more design. Deciding to reduce the quantity of objects and information could facilitate a real cultural change for the better. This may seem too strong a statement, because it goes against our culture and economic system. This makes it quite problematic. But to begin with, we might state that at least the external notion of richness could be related to reducing and to throwing away things and so on, instead of increasing the quantity of objects and information. And that our main problem is to increase the quality of life and not the quantity of the stuff we put into it.

T o w a r d s . a . N e w . E x i s t e n c e . M i n i m u m

This perspective of reduction does not necessarily imply a return to some kind of obsolete moralism, a sad return to impoverishment and the bush. An recent example in Italy may serve to illustrate this. There was a movement called slow food, meaning the opposite of fast food. We still have some of these places where there is good-quality food; where the cooking is still done by grandmothers that know how to cook and grow the food. This is the pleasure of slowing things down and of synthesis. Again, keeping to this gastronomic parallel, Italian cuisine is very synthetic. We only have plain ingredients. And this limitation to a clear, well-defined set of synthetic ingredients is the basis of good quality food, which means improvement in the quality of life.

In a way, this combines the culture of the peasants and the aristocracy (cutting out the culture of the bourgeoisie that we probably all hate). It contains some of the everyday, material culture of the peasants and some of the lifestyle of the aristocracy that doesn't need many machines as they have slaves to work for them.

Looked at in a positive light, this culture of reduction could be seen as a new kind of existence minimum that maintains a maximum of quality (the existence minimum was one of the concepts of the modern movement in architecture; the central idea was to reduce the dimensions of the home as much as possible to allow as many people as possible to have a home). What it brought was the reduction of the dimensions of the home to a minimum, so that we all now live in a very limited number of square meters. My idea of a reduction of the quantity of things could be seen as a translation of this existence minimum without losing sight of quality.

From this a possible definition of the home emerges in which it does not matter whether it is material or virtual or immaterial, but is simply a place where I don't want any junk. It's up to you to decide what is or isn't junk. I want to define home as a real, deep and rich place. We could eventually accept some immaterial and virtual presence only if a real, deep and rich presence already exists.

A parallel to the story of the house swimming in objects can be found in what has happened to our warm, smelly and material bodies. Objects became portable, miniaturized, electronic and battery-powered and we started to carry a lot of nice objects around with us. For some, including myself, this meant and means to be nomadic, to have a different way of life, to be able to be at home everywhere. But the problem arises when these objects start to communicate, when all the objects on our person are surrounded by waves. There is a danger of becoming a new Saint Sebastian with twelve plug-ins. This is not just a statement of criticism. It is a real design attitude.

We would like to avoid plug-ins and to avoid having too many things attached to our bodies.

I have a serious example of this. I'm working on a project of technologies for disabled people. These are people who strongly need technology in some way, irregardless of ethical considerations of whether the technologies are material or not. But we tried to avoid plug-ins as much as possible in this project. Of course, in certain cases, plug-ins become inavoidable, with protheses, for example, or if people don't have some active part of the body. But we wanted to establish this border line between plugged and unplugged, even for people who need technology to live. We chose to reinforce partial activity where present. We wanted to use technology to make the person act, instead of replacing the person's activity, even activity of a very limited kind.

So several main issues have emerged so far: one is that our relations with space change when we deal with new communications and technologies. Our notion of territory is changing, because we possess part of virtual territory in any case; the space of the house includes a strange window to anywhere. The challenge is to combine the two territories in the material world.

The other thing that points to the importance of the material world, is that some metaphors of organization and information are still highly material and are thus help in designing and organizing space--deciding the location of hierarchies, axes, the central perspective, and so forth.

This must be seen in combination with the above considerations of our changing approach to consumerism and the changing structure of national space and information.

We spent some time trying to understand whether we needed a new discipline to deal with all this and discovered that we already have a discipline: material culture. By this we mean the analysis, study and description of everything happening in the home: how we relate to the physical objects, the relations between people and objects, how we prepare food, how we speak on the phone and so on. Could we update this discipline, now largely relegated to the `museum', concerned with people's everyday behavior in the Roman empire? I think it should be brought to bear on the project at hand.

Another important thing to understand, not only in relation to the discipline of design, is possible anthropological relations in the spaces of the home, regarding ancient tools and perhaps new ones. For example, is there any anthropological limit to the quantity of incoming information, not only in cognitive but in purely physical terms? How much information, phone calls, TV, etc. can we accept? This defines an absolute level of saturation that we eventually reach, or rather, must be careful not to reach.

T w o . C o n c e p t s . o f . H o m e

I have two basic concepts of the home. I call the first one the sensible home. Among the many connotations of the word sense, it is the one of making sense that I mean, firstly. The first thing that we want our home to do is to make sense, to produce meaning, to have significance. This is related to the necessity of cancelling out the junk and to keeping a high level of quality in the home. The second meaning of sensible home might be: a place where the senses are enhanced, or simply a good place for the senses and our feelings. And this has to do with the sensorial qualities of material and virtual space. The third possible meaning is that the home itself could be sensitive or act as a filter, taking out some of the information or keeping it for a while before it gives it to us.

I want to quote two rather unplugged opinions by famous people. The first one is from Ettore Sotsass, a well-known architect who was invited to express his opinion about multimedia at a congress in Venice and said: They are nice, but I really can't imagine anything better than taking a book and going out into the sunshine on my terrace in Filicudi and reading it, page by page.

The second almost unplugged opinion is from Tonino Guerra, who has for a long time been co-author of the movies of Federico Fellini. He was asked to express his opinion about electronic technologies in cinema. He said: Frankly, I don't give a damn about technology. They can give us all kinds of machines, but what I want to find is a director with poetry. What I need today is somebody that has something to say, some poetry to express.

The reason I quote these two opinions is because they seem unplugged, but come from two people who aren't: Ettore Sotsass is probably the most iconoclastic of architects. We cannot define him as a reactionary. Tonino Guerra works in cinema and is one of the founders of the new medium that was cinema.

Perhaps the important thing I feel in these opinions is that they are very selective about technology: if it is not able to recreate the same material quality we got from the old medium of expression, forget it!

Continuing with this idea of the sensible home, I want to use this image to show how our relations with space in the home are changing: there are presences that come from the home itself; possibilities of looking outside our home, and the possibility of intrusion into our home. Let us try to build a sensible home in which all these presences are well-organized.

The second issue is how to organize space. Our example now is the coach potato. We must not become mega-screen potatoes.

I have some examples here. This is a sketch done during a brainstorming session I did with the NTT, the Japanese telephone company, on communication spaces. It is just an idea of how to organize space in the screen that does not imitate papers, windows and so on. A space in which the presence of persons is combined with information and everything is situated within a simulated space.

This is probably a better example of a space of co-presences, as opposed to virtual or material presence. This work by William Hogarth is a perfect re-creation of perspective, but is not perspective, because it plays a few `tricks' in hierarchies in the scale. That was one of the interesting devices of pre-perspective painting. So we could probably develop a kind of space that combines all these things.

Another possible way to go beyond the coach-potato or mega-screen effect is to dissolve the presences of communication into the home. This example arose from brainstorming about video communication at home, working and speaking with distant people in a situation in which you are not concentrated on the screen. You share the presence of the person with the virtual paper you are using.

This is the last example: a project by a student at Domus Academy, where I teach. The idea was to try to materialize the physical presence of persons in telecommunication. So this is a device to work at a distance, where face-to-face communication is always split from the communication in working together . Finally, this strange material presence of people is created.

I call the second scenario, after the famous song: wherever I lay my head is my home. This means the possibility of living and feeling at home everywhere. Technology does indeed allow this. But is this what we want to do? In such a case, it is possible that the territory formed by our person is transformed by a highly increased ability to reach and communicate with any other place. There is also the possibility of being intruded on by other presences in our own territory. In this case, it would also be helpful if the home works as a sensible shield for information, a filter, and is able to stop communication we don't want.

Here is another example from a student of Domus Academy. The problem was to study the behavior of people when they telecommunicate around the city, for example, with cellular phones. This produced provocative results that I consider very poetic: a real project of an inflatable personal territory that you could use to isolate yourself.

We don't have to take this as a real project, but as a poetic representation of what already exists: it is for us to decide whether we consider this too strong a form of isolation or the smallest possible size of our home.

To conclude, I return to the beginning of my talk: the fact is that the house is still there. We don't have to do very much to create a nice place to live in.

We simply have to look to a possible renaissance of material culture, to study and try to understand how we behave, how we move, and to return to a place that is just a very nice place to stay: a place where we keep all the smell, all the material, all the sensorial qualities of the traditional home while simply trying to add some additional qualities.