Hacking the living room. Interview with Konstantin Grcic

By Simone Achermann

With the increasing lack of space in urban areas, fewer people settling down and everybody online all the time, privacy is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. To guarantee it in the future, says designer Konstantin Grcic, we will have to be proactive and hack our cities, homes and furniture.

Konstantin Grcic, you considered the rooms of the future in depth for your “Panorama” exhibition in the Vitra Design Museum. How will we be living tomorrow?

I think some functions of a private home will be away from it in future, for example the bathroom or the kitchen. As a city-dweller in particular I can go to the swimming baths or the gym to take a shower. I don’t have to do my own cooking, either. Even more such public spaces could actually be built in the future that would also be better equipped than what I have now at home. We would then have more scope to make our private domain even more private. That’s increasingly important, because individuals in urban areas have less and less space available to them and the rest will become so valuable and expensive that people will want to keep it exclusively for really important things. That said, I’m not into predicting the future. My goal is to question the present and today’s home culture. That means opening our minds to new ideas. However, if it was up to me we would live in a much more reduced style in future.

What should stay in the home?

Firstly, whatever is most important to you personally. That’s subjective, of course. But I think it will almost always be objects that tell a story and give you a feeling of being at home. They may be photos, books, an alarm clock or an armchair. Pieces of furniture do almost become “creatures” with the passing of time; you think of them as having a kind of personality – possibly because many are four-legged. Beyond that, every home naturally needs to keep a certain basic infrastructure. As an illustration, we developed a kind of plug and play module in the exhibition – symbolic of the basic utilities we need every day: a mobile structure that can be carried by handles, reconfigured and set up anywhere at any time, that you can take with you when you move so that you’ll always have the whole infrastructure with you right away. It has an integrated technical utilities unit containing a power supply, heating, air conditioning, wi-fi and a WLAN. Because home living in the future will of course be associated more and more with frequent removals from town to town, people being less settled or at least being on the go a very great deal.

How can we make homes more individual? When we look at the trend in the furniture market, mass products dominate the scene more and more.

That’s true, but that said, the big furniture stores are needed to satisfy the demand for home articles. And the variety of their range makes it possible to combine items and furnish rooms individually. Pseudo-individually in many cases, though. In this connection, the Airbnb phenomenon is interesting: a digital platform of private homes that you can rent easily anywhere in the world. The original idea was that you could so to speak immerse yourself in a real life. That said, with the success and phenomenal growth of the platform a new category of homes has been created serving rental as their sole purpose, and as a consequence being furnished in a really strange way. The furniture often pretends to have individuality and personality, but really only expresses clichés. As a result, a mix of supposed homeliness and easy-care functionality is created like in a hotel room, which I personally find frustrating. But it has nothing to do with the experience of being someone’s guest and the trust that should be based on. By the way, it’s already a problem for many cities that more and more homes, in many cases whole apartment blocks, are available to a constantly shifting population but not to the people who actually live in those cities. Airbnb is therefore an example of something that was a really good idea to start with, has taken on a life of its own and become a huge problem because it makes whole neighbourhoods anonymous and ultimately makes solidarity in urban communities difficult. And yet that solidarity would be needed now more than ever: the bigger and more anonymous the cities become, the more important is interaction in the local district.

How can we boost the social exchange between local residents?

We can seek the foundation in traditional forms of living, with different parties living in the same building, talking to, supporting and helping each another. In my view that’s not old-fashioned, but more modern than ever. And it will become much more important with cities increasing in scale at a rapid pace, for example in China.

Homes are becoming intelligent with the “internet of things”. Furniture will be fitted with sensors and microchips in future, and it’s supposed to help make our lives easier. Is that a good thing?

It’s not clear yet how important this digital infrastructure will be. Are we developing these things because we really need them, or just because we can? I’m of the opinion that it could be better to keep our furniture clear of technology. Electronics has a half-life of split seconds, and the personal things I mentioned earlier are often explicitly “slow”: a chair will still be a chair I can sit on in another 100 years. If, however, it’s had a ton of electronics installed in it, it may be out of date in three years’ time and more or less disqualify itself.

At the same time, however, maybe an interactive chair could become all the more personal because it recognises me and, for example, moves automatically to my favourite place by the window when the light is a certain way.

Yes, that’s right, such things are not unattractive per se. Nevertheless, I’ve a certain aversion to them. I don’t need a chair that measures my blood pressure or tells me I should drink more. I notice it myself when I’m dehydrated. Also, I believe this constant monitoring makes you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing all the time. Life becomes less carefree. I know a lot of people are much opener than I am in that respect. Many of my friends, for example, live, eat and exercise entirely on the instructions of some app or other nowadays. And I don’t want to cut myself off entirely from the whole thing. The smartphone is one good example of how useful technical innovation can be – even though I’m very glad that my phone is still an object that I can leave at home occasionally or at least switch off. As soon as we’re no longer able to do that because we start implanting things, for example, we get more and more into the clutches of technology. Even now, with the smartphone, everybody is checking their emails all the time. I think we have to watch out not to reinforce this compulsion even more.

So should the home of the future actually be our retreat, the place where we can finally be offline?

Judging by the nerves that attack me when I land up somewhere with no internet for a couple of days, I would say that absolutely no networking with the outside world can’t be the answer. But you definitely have to be free to make the decision on whether or not you want to connect.

We’ve been talking a lot about the reduction in our living space. At the same time, the opposite is happening as well: more and more people are planting tomatoes on the rooftops and producing electricity with home solar cells. Where is this desire for self-sufficiency leading to?

Indeed we are observing a trend towards more rather than less functionality. A lot of it – particularly when people grow their own food – is connected with declining confidence in industry: people don’t know exactly where the products they buy come from, how organic they are etc. At the same time, there’s also a desire for more environmentally compatible solutions behind the striving for more self-sufficiency. That said, it would be almost impossible for individuals to handle the complexity of a truly self-sufficient way of life. However, the trend towards growing your own isn’t just about mistrust of external structures. There’s also a kind of social ecology behind it. A structure that’s about sharing, in which people talk to each other and take responsibility for each other. Actually a very good approach, particularly if every residential unit doesn’t manage its own garden, but a whole street does it together. That’s also more efficient and can be a very good way of strengthening the community spirit whose disappearance we discussed earlier. That said, the whole thing is fraught with risks as well. Because as soon as I undertake a task in a community, it means I’m under observation, an additional pressure to do everything right, because otherwise I could suffer social sanctions. But that’s in flat contradiction to what constitutes privacy: to have a space where you can let go, make mistakes, be untidy and even put up ugly things, in other words, a little refuge beyond the glossy Facebook profiles where so much is artificially enhanced, retouched or untrue.

What can designers or even mass furniture manufacturers like Ikea do to facilitate this privacy and thereby reinforce personality?

I think the ideal piece of furniture would actually be one you can “hack” – in other words, change and adapt for yourself: it provides a basic structure and building on that I can make it work for me personally and be to my taste. But the problem is this: if you put hacking into a commercial context, it becomes artificial. Yet the main reason it’s attractive is because it’s opposed to the market, to commerce. So it would actually be desirable for this counterculture to always be able to find something it can hack in the future. Ikea furniture is essentially very suitable for the purpose already: it’s simple, anonymous, can be disassembled into its component parts – and above all it’s low-priced, so you can afford to go wrong from time to time on the design without losing too much money.

Should the principle of hacking be applied to urban development as well?

Yes, absolutely. During the Olympics in Barcelona there was a very clever town planner who saw parts of the city more or less as an open-source project that the residents could add to and keep changing, that they could essentially “hack” by themselves. It didn’t lead to high-end shopping streets, of course, but it did produce the individual momentum that’s much more valuable than anything you could plan in one large-scale effort: small businesses, artists, playschools etc. found a home there. We should enable open structures like this much more often. When you yourself become part of something, can make a contribution, it becomes something personal that you identify with. And as a result, an awful lot of problems that are endemic to urban areas more or less solve themselves: people will look after their houses, front yards and the rest of their environment more instead of letting them go downhill.

KONSTANTIN GRCIC is a German designer. He trained as a cabinet maker at the John Makepeace School before studying design at the Royal College of Art in London. After a year as an assistant with Jasper Morrison, he set up his own design practice KGID (Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design) in Munich in 1991. Since then he has developed furniture, lighting and accessories for a large number of manufacturers. Some of his designs have found a place in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Konstantin Grcic showcases his visions of the home and life of the future in the “Konstantin Grcic Panorama” exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum until mid-September 2014.