Future Themes
My speeches are suitable for events that are about how we will live in the future; i.e architecture, lifestyle, design, furniture, building, and city development. Below are outlines of my most popular speeches, as well as my A to Z of themes to choose from depending on the event and audience and the customers wishes. For more detail or information about any of these, please don’t hesitate to contact me: oona@horx.com
How can we plan and build a new urban climate? Community, ecology, and mobility have all come into sharp focus. We are redefining what community means to us and discovering a form of social, environmental and economic co-immunity that reaches beyond our health to our communities and our city services. Some highlights:
The 15-minute city The corona crisis has brought with it a sense of hyper-localisation. With this newly embedded cognitive map of where we live and work, we can envisage a future that is about reclaiming the local. In order to do this, we need to shift from just thinking about community in just the social sense, to co-immunity – a strategy that is about our relationships to building mental, physical and economic health. One strategy is the so-called 15-minute city – whereby we can reach most essential services within this time frame on foot or by bike. While we cannot completely rebuild our cities, we can employ “urban acupuncture”, redesign our public spaces, and rethink mobility priorities. Following a devastating plague and fire, Londoners in the 17th century had a greater sense of community than ever before thanks to a rebuilt city. Today we have the chance to make small effective changes based on new priorities. Community is dead, long live co-immunity.
Neo Agora How the civic living room informs our social, economic, and mental health. Public space has been valued and used as never before, and the pressure to increase the access to and amount of our outdoor civic living rooms is higher than ever. The Agora was a key social institution in ancient Greece and the modern interpretation is a key to the health of the city of the future. While a temporary increase of pedestrian zones and bike lanes helped many cities with social distancing during the crisis, there will be good arguments for increasing them in the future.
Neo-Ecology Making building sustainable and sexy: redesigning with concrete and wood. The new laws of building for a post-digital society.
Mobility »Copenhagenisation«, shared spaces and the new connectivity.
The Real Smart City What makes a city smart? During the lockdown many of us “heard” silence for the first time in our cities – revealing a pressing need for reducing traffic, encouraging e-mobility and greening our cityscapes. As well as planning new urban landscapes, many cities worldwide are striving for carbon neutrality within the next 10 to 20 years. What measures are they taking, and how can it be achieved? When smart city planning goes beyond smart technology to smart thinking.
The Visible Citizen The invisible citizen is a neglected and lonely one, especially in the city. For too long loneliness was a taboo theme in society, but thanks to the corona crisis, we are recognising the needs and challenges faced for the large population of both old and young who live alone.
The future of the home is about the shift in our relationship to our space. When every m2 counts, we need to think differently about materials, the layout, our objects, cohabitants, and even ourselves. A taste of what is to come:
Hero Materials From authenticity to activism: the materials reforming our material lives. From furniture to the walls, a revolution in thinking about what surrounds us.
Tidyism Beyond the joy of things to a new relationship to our homes and ourselves.
Hygge 2.0 Home-Suite-Home: Our homes were the neglected Aunt in the family – we all knew she needed more attention, but never found the time to get round to it. Now she has moved in! Hygge style home design is experiencing a revival. It is not longer seen as decadent or indulgent but a necessity in the post Corona world. With the prospect of less travel, we are taking “suite” inspiration from the world of hotel design. We are redesigning our spaces so we can live and work, where we can feel cocooned but not cut off.
Co-Living Beyond Co-rona living and co-isolation to the individualistic social pod of the future. The new image and industry of co-living – both in and outside the city.
The Real Smart Home The Future Evolution House in Vienna is a live experiment in designing a real smart home – in “translating” trends and Megatrends into a home and work space. This modular house set out to challenge the old rules of building and room design – to balance the flexible needs of a mobile individualistic family. From the bathroom salon to the Kitchen Hub, and from the active energy concept to the idea of the mindful. A journey to the heart of the home from the bathroom salon to the living kitchen. From so-called “toys for the boys” or “digital viagra” to the building of a real relationship to our home.
We are moving away from the idea of the passive building to the active one. With new thinking and technology in ecology, we can move on from a guilt driven ecology to one which celebrates abundance. Furthermore, examples of fast, efficient and flexible building of medical facilities during the corona crisis have highlighted the advantages of pre-fabricated and modular building. The same principles can be applied to the building of our homes and offices in the future – from individualised designer cabins to mobile zero-energy homes to whole housing estates.
Blue Building Beyond green ecology to the new blue ecology in building with wood or concrete. From cradle-to-cradle, up-cycling, to post-digital homes with intelligent renewal of energy.
Modular and Mass Produced Creative individualised solutions for offices, communities, families or individuals. Fast, ecological and low cost and low disturbance – why we need a more positive image.
Micro Lessons Flexibility, adaptivity, and ingenuity: How to design better homes when every square meter counts.
We have long been bamboozled with the idea of the smart everything. Smart city and the smart home. The corona crisis has upended our relationship to our home. The contrast between the digital and the non-digital world has been brought into sharp focus – we are re-evaluating what makes sense, what is essential and how to find an “om-line” balance between our on-line and off line lives.
Working from home and feeling at home at work: The melting together of the design, function and economy of these work spheres is stronger than ever before. Meanwhile the office landscape is changing to adapt to the new nervousness about social distancing, as well as feeding the need to become more of a home.
The Hoffice How do we design our “hoffice” (home office) of the future? We need to address not just the challenges of the physical design but the psychological aspects. Post-corona campaigning to work more from home, and governments regulating for this shift, means we need to look at how this can work in terms of time management, design and trust.
The Worktel How will the landscape and rules of work change with less business travel and more remote work? The landscape of the office will be more adaptive, more temporary and more like a hotel.
