Understanding the Home, Week 6: Changing Your Home

Understanding Your Home Week 6: Changing Your Home

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SEVEN TOOLS The seven tools are: 1 Learning to see 2 Kaizen / Piecemeal development 3 Circles of influence 4 Control your work 5 Value your time 6 A learning community 7 Patterns The purpose of having tools (and not rules or steps) is to be able to create all kinds of homes. In a society of a variety of cultures and people, viewpoints and lives, as we have today, we should have as broad a variety of homes. Remember the house as mirror of self Some may have dense, lavish homes. Others, homes that are self-‐sustaining and farmhouse like. Others, spare and Zen. And many others, too, far to diverse to list. Not everyone is “normal”, nor should they be. Innovation comes from the outliers.




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1 Learning to see A term from Japanese manufacturing. It means this:

• You can’t produce without waste unless you know what value you are trying to create.

• Once you know value, then every step or use of resources

that does not add to that value is waste.

• Once you understand this, you can walk around a factory and SEE value and SEE waste.

• Learning to see is a process that never ends.

Home starts with knowing what values you are trying to produce in your home. We’ve talked about three big social values, present in many homes:

• The next generation • Strong relationships • Rest and recovery

But every home will be different. Articulate yours. Fighting with kids over getting to school on time is waste, if not how you want to raise the next generation. Watching TV is waste, if it does not truly rest you.




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2 Kaizen / Piecemeal development

Another Japanese word, Kaizen, means continuous improvement. Christopher Alexander called this “piecemeal development.” Many natural processes proceed piecemeal, without a final blueprint. This lies at the heart of Japan’s economic engine. It’s not abstract philosophy. Making your home is a process of social reinforcement or social transformation. If your home grows out of your values, then your values become manifest in you home. If you offer others a series of steps, in which each step contains its own reward, then it’s easy to take steps. This is different from a process in which the reward only comes when all step are complete. If each step contains its own reward, its easy to get the habit. You are less likely to lose heart.




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3 Circles of influence The source of waste are manifest. In this course, we’ve looked at how commercial and industrial processes invade the home, and interfere with the values of the home, through three strategies:

• Push stuff into the home • Outsource their work into the home • Dump stress into the home

The list can be extended. In tackling any issue of waste, it’s important to distinguish actions at different levels. In the case of fighting to get kids to school, one is being free labour for the school. One can tackle this:

• At home, by being more efficient • In community, by seeking solutions through parent • Politically, as they have in Norway: by making the school day

start later Different levels mean different forms of action, different scale of size and time. Know at which scale you intervene.




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4 Control your work It’s almost impossible to make your house your own unless you control your life. A “wage slave” can find themselves:

• 10 hours a day gone with unpaid overtime • 3 hours a day lost in commuting • home time invaded by work thoughts and messages • pumped full of stress hormones

Some key ideas: The portfolio life: Make your work life out of a portfolio of income-‐earning activities. Some contribute value. Some contribute cash. Some joy. Some a mix. Over time, improve your portfolio. Sack lousy clients or employers without throwing yourself on the job market. Third spaces: You may not need to “go to work”. Some work can be done:

• At home • In a café, for meetings or a change of scenery • In a neighbourhood co-‐working space or fab lab • Client offices

“Free agents” and “brand you”: Understand the value you bring. Even in a job, treat yourself as a business.

“In the 17th century, London's importance as a trade centre led to increasing demand for ship and cargo insurance. Edward Lloyd's coffee house became recognised as the place to go for marine information and soon for insurance, too – and it’s here that the Lloyd’s we know today began.” “The coffee-‐house most closely associated with science was the Grecian, the preferred coffee-‐house of the members of the Royal Society, Britain's pioneering scientific institution. On one occasion a group of scientists including Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley dissected a dolphin on the premises.”




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5 Value your time Half the world’s time is not valued. That’s the time spent at home. At the same time, that home time can be where the most important values are created. We need money to buy commodities: food, housing, transport. But because only half our time is monetarily valued we get caught in bind: caught in trading in your unpaid time for lower prices, or for money. This is what IKEA does: offer you low prices, in exchange for your unpaid time as shopper, warehouse picker, delivery driver and Three ways: Put a dollar value on your time: Valuations of household work tend to suggest AUD25.00 as a reasonable. Then, you can calculate the true cost of things before you make that trade. Convert all costs into time: Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez describe the process for doing so in “Your Money or Your Life.” Be unreasonable: I know a number of artists. Many are willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid selling their time, which would rob them of their art.

“The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.”




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6 A learning community Transforming your home is a process as complex as transforming the world or transforming yourself. This is because it is the very process of transforming your world or transforming yourself.

• An economy which is forced to serve the values that are produced at home would be a very different economy.

• Transforming your home involves a process of finding your

values, and then aligning your actions inside your sphere of influence to those values.

It’s hard to reinvent the home alone. Therefore, enter into conversation with others. Try stuff out. Share your learning. Learn from others. Fortunately, just as any conversation about the home can be understood as a policy conversation, almost any questions can be understood as about life at home. So you don’t have be boring. Even philosophy can boil down to: How shall we best live? To structure this learning, two cycles:

• Nonaka: Organisational learning • Kolb: Adult learning.




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7 Patterns How can we best share knowledge in a way that’s reusable and improvable? The architect Christopher Alexander spent many years on this question and came up with the idea of a pattern. A pattern is a simple solution to a common problem, expressed in three parts:

• The context: when this problem occurs • The solution: an idea of how to deal with it • The argument: why we might think this is going to work.

A set of interlinking patterns is called a pattern language. As originally formulated, patterns are very rigid. But we don’t have to be rigid. A pattern is a story: What you saw happening. The process you went through of understanding it. What you changed. How that worked out. This follows classical story arc: a person is challenged, struggles to overcome the challenge, and is changed (or in tragedy: fails). The story arc has two components: an inner and outer arc. How the world is changed. How the person is changed. There is no “best” story: To the same challenge, there will be a variety of resolutions. Different patterns might even suggest opposite resolutions. Good luck! Have fun. Live well.

Lifestyle

Understanding the Home, Week 6: Changing Your Home