Something today a little less... well, just less.

I came across in my travels the concept of tiny housing, and tiny by design and intent, not by necessity. The concept of building compact, efficient housing for the home owner would have traditionally taken your standard sized home.

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses/

The design is quintessentially American but the concept has to be universal. Some will argue that most major cities already incorporate 'tiny accommodation' .. driven by an ever growing population living in squalor but for me the point here is not just to promote the living IN less... it is more about the living WITH less.

I mean, if people in the western world can live in 65 square feet... let me do the conversion for you.. that is less than 6 square metres! ... then what else could we do with less.

There was an interesting documentary I saw a few years ago and it argued the case for and against recycling but the key message it left people with was your rate of consumption is the key driver in your use of resources, not the rate of recycling.

And it leads me to thinking what else can we design that is minimal in our consumption. I mean, packaging is the obvious candidate but what else?

What if you could design roads that were 25% thinner? or windows that were 40% thinner? We think about making the end product smaller, lighter or thinner but why not the inputs? the materials?

There is an interesting story/myth about the link between the boosters of the space shuttle and the size of a horse's butt (read it here)  which has some debatable facts however highlights a hugely common occurrence that can be essentially reverse engineered from engineers dictum (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). We tend to continue to do things they way they have always been done.

The dimensions of your average house brick (and thus the walls they build) has remained fairly constant over the centuries. Surely we can re-visit the design of the average brick to have it use 25% less material? and thus the bricks used in the millions of houses built each year

I believe there is a huge opportunity to re-design the materials we use in the products we design so that tiny houses can be achieved on a grand scale