tech, tech and more tech

Another attempt at predicting what features might be in the house of the future. Am I the only one who wonders why the future is always portrayed as "current trends, amplified"? I have seen pictures from old magazines envisioning cities of the future with skyscrapers that dedicated most of their space to allowing cars to drive to the top, to meet airplanes landing on the roof. The dreamers were enthralled at the prospect of moving up to previously unimagined heights, but failed to consider that cars were not the way to get there. If there is one thing forecasters have been notoriously bad at, it's anticipating how new technologies will be used - invariably there are unintended behaviours and designs that result.

Still, one thing that most certainly will be needed in houses in the very near future is improved monitoring of resource consumption. Today's carbon calculators are too simplified and generic to be much use in tracking attainment of personal, municipal and national targets. We need to be far more aware of the impacts of individual day-to-day decisions.

One of the ideas expressed at the Green Building Retrofitting Seminar on 10 April was "sweat the small stuff". We can't rely only on grand plans to manage resources more responsibly. Colin Devenish from the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town pointed out that if toilets were modified to reduce water consumption by only one litre per flush, the Waterfront would save 23 million litres a year. But we can't manage what we don't measure.