The Australian home of the future, today
The Australian home is changing with technology: layout, location and how we interact with friends, family and neighbours.
Give me a home among the gum trees, with lots of plum trees… If ever there was an aspect of the great Australian lifestyle that has evolved most over the years it is the household. Not only the family structure, but the actual physical structure of the house has changed from a three bedroom brick-veneer on a large surburban plot, to today’s high-rise apartment inner city living and outer-suburban McMansions.
So the question is, how will the arrival of the nbn™ network allow us to re-imagine how we use our homes in the future? Will it change where we live? What about the physical layout of our homes?
- Location, location, location: there are currently eight million people living outside Australian capital cities. This figure is expected to grow to 10 million in 2030. As more people set up their own small businesses or deliver work over high-speed broadband there could be a move away from big cities to sea-change and tree-change locations.
- The house plan of the future: The home of the future will likely include a central location for us to conduct our work, rest and play. It may have a single communications hub or more likely a series of workspaces where mum, dad and kids connect into their work, school and social networks. The home may evolve into a new style of hotel where household members come and go and interact in much the same way office workers of the future might come and go and collaborate as required.
- The online neighbourhood: The idea of the neighbourhood as we know it may change as we connect with like-minded tribes online. On the positive side this tribal connectedness creates new and vibrant communities. But this might also lead to people only mixing with like-minded people rather than the mix we see in the traditional physical neighbourhood.
- Staying connected: The way GenNBN communicate with family and friends will be vastly different in 2030 because of the universality of the internet and the scope to use technology like Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, and other technology yet-to-be-invented to stay connected.
See below for a comparison of the typical floor plan of a home in the 1950s and a modern home with its many devices and connection points.
For more information on the Towards a Super Connected Australia report visit nbnco.com.au/GenNBN.