Generational iteration

tarazkp(86)
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Based on a comment chain with manoldonchev@manoldonchev recently, I was thinking about the house we have bought, which is nearing 60 years of age and has seen several families come and go. My thoughts were on how children who inherit the homes of their parents may change them, modify them, extend them and upgrade them over time. I think it would be interesting to somehow track the version history of a home and see what has been changed and perhaps, tie it to what is happening in the world around the time of change. Will the current lockdown status change homes for the future?

It might in some way, or at least, get people thinking a little differently about their homes as they have now been forced to spend a great deal more time there than earlier. Especially for those working from home, they might now be more aware of their space and whether it offers an effective environment for the tasks at hand. Not everyone has a spare room and there are many working from a sofa or a kitchen table, as I have done the last three years once our daughter laid stake to her room.

Once past the current panpanic, there will be an increased drive for corporations to shift toward more remote working environments, distributed organizations. There are large benefits for the companies, as they can cut down heavily on rented office space as well as have more shared space, which also means shared equipment - in the office. This will also mean that they will have to support the equipment needs to some degree to ensure that employees have what they require to deliver.

I remember a case from university about a company that was seeing massive costs from office stationery theft - it is amazing how many pens and paperclips people can take. To solve the issue, they simply cleaned away the office supply storage room of everything that a person may need at their desk - and replaced it with a 50 dollar stationery expense payment each month. Employees could use or not use the money, but it was their responsibility to make sure they have what they needed. The vast majority of employees preferred this as they could pocket the majority of the money each month - as no one needs 50 dollars worth of pens.

The people I have talked to about moving to remote working office life have nearly all been forced to create makeshift spaces - to adjust their current living conditions in order to accommodate a larger desk or multiple monitors that they wouldn't normally have at home. This disruption forces a change in the environment, a place where people feel the safest, the home. It is also where people likely exhibit the strongest habitual processes and small changes can affect the home-life rhythm.

The changes may be necessary and could seem arbitrary, but small shifts do have an effect on the way we feel and make us feel uncomfortable and out of place, kind of like being in the home of a stranger who says - "make yourself at home" - most people won't immediately take their pants off. Most people.

This house was built less than 20 years after the end of the war, in an area that is filled with the homes built specifically for the returned soldiers. they are called "Rintamamies" houses, Battlefront soldier homes. Because of this, they have spaces built for cold storage of food as that was obviously hard to get and, those who built them experienced the shortages first hand - something their children and grandchildren have not - having not much toilet paper on the shelves for a few hours, is about as close as most have come.

This means that the designed spaces of the past are getting repurposed for current living - food storage spaces are becoming wine cellars, bomb shelters turned into home theaters and rooms that used to house several children, offices for families with less or no children at all. The shape of society changes and as we buy and sell our homes, the shape of the homes change too, reform and mutate into something that is suitable for the new world it will shelter. The renovation of a home is much like an embodiment of our current social state, the evolution of a space that has been repurposed countless times in the past, even demolished and rebuilt to better serve the needs of the new owners.

Some see the protection of the past as a duty, but it has to be tempered with the needs of a changing world and the way in which we live it. Preservation shouldn't cost innovation and while it is good to keep the lessons of the past in play, eventually all physical things will be lost, degrade to dust through neglect or accident - eventually, all masterpieces will disintegrate in one way or another.

It is an endless cycle of all creation - Life, death and rebirth.

The changes and upgrades we are making to our new, old home will have to be to suit our needs, but we are also trying to maintain its soul, to keep it alive through repurposing rather than replacing. It is not possible for all things, but our changes to the house will become the paint over what has already been painted countless times earlier - and will one day be repainted again - hopefully by our daughter when the time comes.

I am interested in what she would do to her childhood home given the chance. Will she look to hold it in a vacuum of time and space to preserve her memories or, repurpose it to suit the needs of her time, her life and perhaps, the family she will raise in the same space she herself was raised. The same space - but it will be different by degrees, with some parts at first glance having no connection to what they earlier were - but of course, it is always connected - a generational iteration of change on what is unchanging. Home.

As the saying goes, home is where the heart is - it isn't a style, a model or a technological advancement - it is a state of being.

Generational iteration | Ecency