Just put it somewhere
There are days, when you loose faith in humanity, then there are days when things just seems right. Like today, I saw a business woman settling down on a bench, with her take away coffee in one hand, her briefcase beside her, to feed the pidgins. She looked so happy, in her own calm little bubble while the rest of the us rushed her by on our way to work. She managed to find her own space in a place where people almost stepped on her toes to get where they had to go. I’ve never seen her before, even though I pass through that park almost every day (all depending on if I’m in the mood for the shortest way, or in the mood to explore the longer routs).
Of course I wonder how she lives, and how she behaves when she steps out of her own space and starts interacting with the crowd of the rush hour, but at the same time, I didn’t care. All i knew was that she looked calm and was smiling, while others looked stressed with cold faces, and that in turn made me smile.
I should have stopped and taken a picture, but I didn’t want to disturb her.
Anyway, after writing -3- I couldn’t stop thinking about the importance of our home. I guess that we used to have so few things that the building containing it was our main priority, while now we have so many things that we have to get bigger homes just to fitt it all.
Storage, it’s all about storage. Even though a thing is broken, there seems to be a lot of people who have trouble throwing it out, so it just gets put on a shelf or pressed into the garage or cellar.
When it comes to homes, I’m not saying that a happy home can’t be made of a badly planed space, or that a well planed space automatically leads to a well functioning family. What I am saying is that the possibility of getting a more social, and therefor happier family members, is bigger if we start planning our homes after what we actually need, and not what we automatically want.
We don’t need 1 bathroom per person, we don’t need 20m2 for our bedrooms, we don’t need specific play rooms for the kids. Of course, some people find it rather nice to be able to open up a door to a room full with toys and let their kids in there to play, but do they really need so many toys that they have to have special storage containers and shelf systems to be able to fit them all?
This fascination with toys (read “things), do definitely don’t stop when we turn “mature”. There is a saying for it -The toys just get bigger and more expensive the older the boys get- and it’s very true indeed. At the moment I’m enjoying my dear Mac, and the guy on the street is entering his pimped out ride. But the fact is that as fast as the next generation comes, we will probably start striving for it, and it starts with kids and their barbies and dinosaurs.
So yet again, if we design homes with less abundant storage, will that help us stay away from getting so much junk, and make us take conscious decisions of what should stay and what should go, what to get, and what we can do without?
Of course I wonder how she lives, and how she behaves when she steps out of her own space and starts interacting with the crowd of the rush hour, but at the same time, I didn’t care. All i knew was that she looked calm and was smiling, while others looked stressed with cold faces, and that in turn made me smile.
I should have stopped and taken a picture, but I didn’t want to disturb her.
Anyway, after writing -3- I couldn’t stop thinking about the importance of our home. I guess that we used to have so few things that the building containing it was our main priority, while now we have so many things that we have to get bigger homes just to fitt it all.
Storage, it’s all about storage. Even though a thing is broken, there seems to be a lot of people who have trouble throwing it out, so it just gets put on a shelf or pressed into the garage or cellar.
When it comes to homes, I’m not saying that a happy home can’t be made of a badly planed space, or that a well planed space automatically leads to a well functioning family. What I am saying is that the possibility of getting a more social, and therefor happier family members, is bigger if we start planning our homes after what we actually need, and not what we automatically want.
We don’t need 1 bathroom per person, we don’t need 20m2 for our bedrooms, we don’t need specific play rooms for the kids. Of course, some people find it rather nice to be able to open up a door to a room full with toys and let their kids in there to play, but do they really need so many toys that they have to have special storage containers and shelf systems to be able to fit them all?
This fascination with toys (read “things), do definitely don’t stop when we turn “mature”. There is a saying for it -The toys just get bigger and more expensive the older the boys get- and it’s very true indeed. At the moment I’m enjoying my dear Mac, and the guy on the street is entering his pimped out ride. But the fact is that as fast as the next generation comes, we will probably start striving for it, and it starts with kids and their barbies and dinosaurs.
So yet again, if we design homes with less abundant storage, will that help us stay away from getting so much junk, and make us take conscious decisions of what should stay and what should go, what to get, and what we can do without?
