Life-Pods

So anyway, after reading this thing from Thingverse, enthusing about the number of things in a hardware shop that could be rep-rapped… I was thinking how few of our 3D manufactured objects are actually unique enough (at this stage) to warrant it.

And looking around, I couldn’t see any – I could not see one single thing that was unique.

Then I realised I was missing the biggest thing in the room… the room. The house.

I’m quite interested in this because I think the way we (as a culture) are organising housing is seriously stupid. Why is it that it takes the average non-already-rich person most of their adult life to get a place to live? Who benefits? Banks? Fuck them. As far as I can see, the way land/housing organised is THE thing that traps us into class-systems.

We’ve got this weird situation where everything is mass-produced with powerful drivers forcing down the prices… except the one thing that we waste 1/2 our lives paying for.

So I’m interested in cheap, but cool alternatives – and there have been a load of these recently, eg:

Which I think is beautiful – although the million dollar views that it’s designed to have don’t hurt. I wonder how much it costs? I’ve gotten to be a little cynical about hotels etc that are “designed”… at least partly on account of their looking like they’re made for and by web-designers, but the prices are more than the fucking Ritz – even the capsule hotels at Gatwick in London look like they’re cheap but they use that classic sales-person weasel-pitch “from £n.99″ but they’re charging in 4 hour units, so they’re much the same price as a local hotel.

What’s needed is not (only) new design, it’s a whole new business model so people aren’t being systematically, systemically screwed.

There are a load of quite cool and possibly over-produced examples here

Something that does spring to mind as a possibility – boats. I lived on one recently and I don’t know if New Zealand is like everywhere else in the world, but the regulations and costs that turn housing into such a quagmire don’t exist for boats. There isn’t even the MOT/WOF things that cars have.

Whatever. Idly speculating. Whatever new economic system is evolving, we’ve got to sort housing so it serves us and not vice-versa.

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Still, forget about that and check this out:

(via)

Which is a 3D printed thing the size of a… well, house, almost.