Le fabricant d’électronique Samsung a mené une grande étude qui dévoile à quoi ressembleront nos villes dans 100 ans. Au programme : villes sous-marines, impression 3D des repas, connectivité des objets poussée à l’extrême et colonisation de Mars. Malleable, adjustable, personalised home/ work environments According to the World Urbanisation Prospects 20141 issued by the United Nations, the urban population in 2014 accounted for 54% of the total global population, up from 34% in 1960, and will continue to grow (approximately 1.84% per year between 2015 and 2020; 1.63% per year between 2020 and 2025; and 1.44% per year between 2025 and 2030). Just as the last 100 years have witnessed a seismic shift in the way we live, the way we interact with our living space will also change beyond all recognition. As living space in cities becomes scarce, our buildings and interiors will evolve into hyper-flexible spaces. Rooms will serve different functions, walls, floors, ceilings will have embedded technology which will allow them to change position depending on the activity (i.e. making the bedroom much smaller and living room larger when receiving guests)2. These smart walls will be able to change their own shape in 3D by using small responsive actuators pushing and pulling a flexible skin – creating temporary seats or shelves. All this hardware will be connected to wearable devices to which we will add and manage the components of our homes in a similar way to how we currently buy and use apps. (Even Smarter) SmartThings With the development of technology like Samsung SmartThings (which already allows objects within the home to be interconnected online and controlled via a simple app or automated through everyday routines), progress to incorporate these wearable devices that are able to give remote control over a wider array of things, the fundamental way in which we utilise our homes will shift. Imagine being able to just search online to find lost items within the home without having to scour the entire building for hours. Houses will be controlled through a new generation of software that will learn from our living patterns and suggest the appropriate wall configuration, furnitures or add-ons that will then be implemented or 3D printed. Actuators, connected to sensors, as well as home apps, will also have the intelligence to adapt to body shape – informing of any posture issues and correcting them through bespoke exercises. Even the buildings themselves will be capable of adapting to the needs of its inhabitants and the external environment. Based on sensors and user-interfaces, terraces will open up when drones arrive or when solar radiations are too high3 and will retract again when the interiors are too cold. Virtual Decoration Advances in augmented reality and projection mapping will mean that people’s homes will function as the backdrop for projections, seen only by the inhabitant4. As a result of this, walls will be plain and unadorned to the outside observer but seen as anything desired by the user. Anything from ornate 3D sculptures, to baroque dreamscapes and rural pastures will be downloadable, so through wearable technologies two people sharing the same room may experience totally different spaces. For a more communal experience, projection and LED wall surfaces will become commonplace, with home interiors reading and then adapting to the inhabitants’ mood. Embedded within the interior wall furnishings, a multitude of tiny interconnected LEDs will be programmable via wireless computer technology. These will alter in appearance to an almost infinite number of responses – from mirroring traditional wallpaper designs, to displaying (including in real time), scenes from places throughout the world. A new ubiquitous information age of free and unlimited data will open up possibilities of continuously connected streaming infographics displayed on all the walls internally and externally. 3D printed furniture and homeware 3D printing, which is already a reality, will take off in a big way. We will be able to purchase and download designs, and then customise them to fit our exact requirements in terms of shape, size and colour. We will each have small capacity 3D printers in our homes enabling us to print smaller items, whilst for larger items, we will take our purchased designs to a local 3D print shop where they will be generated to our particular specifications. This will lead to a reduction in transportation and delivery costs, as only raw materials will be shipped to homes and 3D shops, allowing for the local production of the desired item. 3D printing will not just be confined to single items, in fact, in recent years it has been developed to construct homes in a fraction of the time of conventional building practices, as well as utilising recycled materials. With homes and parts of the home being available to download and print as the user wishes (even fabrics), anyone will be able to live in a designer home. Furniture will be 3D printed, making it possible to upload houses onto a ‘Domestic Facebook’ in which people will proudly share their homes like they currently share their pictures. People will visit or reprint people’s homes through Virtual Reality headsets or 3D Printers of their own. Landlords will be able to print bespoke virtual interiors before his or her tenants move in. Not only that, but it will be possible to generate homes using algorithms that will take into account social patterns, search engine usage, structural forces, site-specificity, latest innovations and sponsorship. These algorithmic homes will then be printed by swarms of 3D printing drones also controlled by the algorithm.5 In terms of recycling, new developments in solvents will be able to breakdown the polymers that make up these 3D printed items into it monomer blocks. These will then be reconstituted to make new items for the home, again limiting transportation costs and tying in to the recycling culture of the time. The ultimate in recycling.6 3D printing has already allowed for components within the aerospace industry to be manufactured in a tenth of the time traditional components can be, and made and using less than a fifth of the material – and this technology can work using novel materials such as titanium. Sustainability As non-renewable resources reduce, sustainability will be at the heart of our lifestyle choices. Recycling will be fully integrated in our own homes and our wastes will create fuel and electricity through a process called Microbial fuel cell stacks7 . This will be applied to food and plastic wastes as well as toilets and wastewater. A bio-electrochemical system within the home will mimic bacterial interactions found in nature. This ‘digestion tank’ will produce both gas and clean water in a process called anaerobic digestion. Power will be stored in each home through efficient lithium-ion batteries8, taking everyone off the grid and removing the need for large power-plants, thus reducing nuclear waste and carbon emissions. Energy will also be harvested via the natural environment. Smart solar panels, wind turbines and piezo plates will be integrated in the building fabric and connected to the individual’s smart apps. The software and sensors will highlight the wattage being stored in real-time and warn about wasted power. As communication is transmitted in an increasingly wireless manner, so too is the likelihood that alternative forms of electricity and/or its transmission will emerge. This could include capturing the energy generated from particle/ atomic movement and collisions. Fusion will become less of a lab experiment and more commonplace as we utilise Einstein’s equation E=mc2 to generate copious amounts of energy cheaply, cleanly and efficiently. The possibility of using our neighbour in space, the moon, to generate electricity using solar panels on its surface could become cost effective. The energy would then be transmitted down to Earth wirelessly via microwaves giving us another clean source of energy here on Earth. Grow your own at home Sustainability will not just be apparent in energy production and usage, but also within food production. As education about diet increases, it will become commonplace for people to grow their own food at home. Hydroponics is the process of growing plants without soil, only using nutrients; aquaponics combines this process, using an aquarium, to create the plant nutrients from fish waste. Having such a closed-loop system in kitchens will provide fresh fruit as well as fresh fish and shellfish. It will also provide the materials needed to create the bioplastic used in home 3D printers. We are likely to see the emergence of growable surfaces both inside and outside the home. Rain will be captured and stored, then redirected to nurture the plants – which provide insulating properties thus reducing heating needs into the home; they also serve to clean the air; provide food; and will be used to create an architecture that is reconnected to nature. Self-cleaning/repairing materials Our use of cleaning products and plastic packaging will ultimately be reduced or eliminated within the home as self-cleaning and selfrepairing materials render this excess waste unnecessary… Techniques such as biomimicry, the act of copying and furthering nature’s designs, have led to many advances. For example, looking at how the lotus removes water off itself effortlessly on a molecular scale, has led to the invention of spray-on waterproofing11. Nanotreatments of surfaces such as this will become commonplace, so the concept of cleaning will be completely redefined. Furthermore, it will be possible to create self-repairing materials. Self-activating limestone-producing bacteria will be embedded within concrete, fixing any cracks as they appear12. The Bacteria (Bacillus pseudofirmus or Sporosarcina pasteurii) are mixed with concrete and can lie dormant for up to 200 years. They only start to produce limestone when cracks let rain or moisture in. This is a similar process to that carried out by osteoplast cells which make and repair bones in our bodies. This will therefore dramatically change the security of our houses as well as eliminating the need to continually spend money on maintaining them. Architecture of the Future With urban space in high demand, we will see exciting advances and innovations in the architecture of the home and shape of our cities. This will include the emergence of super-skyscrapers, sub aquatic and floating communities and a new trend for building deeper into the earth. Aquatic Homes Water, H2O, can be split through electrolysis13 to create Hydrogen, a viable fuel source; and oxygen, the element we as humans need to breathe. With advances in the efficiency of solar cells it is likely that this free energy source will be used to create sub aquatic communities, breathing the oxygen they create and fuelling their electrical needs through the act of hydrogen creation below the waves. Sub aquatic communities could also draw free energy from the water currents and waves as is already done in wave farms14 around the world today. Water will be desalinated15 through mass implementation of solar technology such as the watercone16. This will allow communities floating above the waves to continuously cruise to the best climate all year round, never needing to stop on land to restock as they would be growing their own produce ’onboard’ and making their own electricity