Biosolar roof panels; ‘roombot’ furniture; intelligent ovens and smart mattresses. We tend to imagine the future home on a gadget-by-gadget basis, homes improved as each new element is introduced into our bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens. But what if we take a more holistic approach, and imagine our future abodes based on what they will feel like as much as what they will do; what they can offer us beyond the practical?

The homes of tomorrow will be places for “visual, physical, emotional and ethical comfort,” believes Laura Cleries, the Barcelona-based, self-styled ‘future lifestyles detective’. Tech will play an increasing part in our private home lives, she says, but the aesthetic reality will be far more subtle than the clunky raygun aesthetic offered up in The Jetsons.

“The future is in materials, innovations that ease our lives ­– heated driveways, self-cleaning glasses and electrochromic opaque-transparent windows, piezoelectric floors for body-movement generated-energy; things that can provide automatisation on non-relevant tasks. Mainly, these things will be invisible, so they’re unlikely to change the visual look of the home in any major way.”

Smart homes in more ways than one

This home of the future relies on data acquisition and smartness, says Cleries. We’ve been promised robot butlers, e-chefs and wireless assistant/pets that do everything from sous chef magic to nanny duties.

But Cleries believes the helpers we’ll host in the future will be discreetly integrated beings, not the novelty of human or animal-aping C3-PO-style models but sleek screens and robots that are “more like skins – morbid soft interfaces such as the octopus robot.”

Instead of aping us, our adopted tech family members will offer a waggish, Her-like dynamic – human in spirit if not aesthetic. “There will be a sort of playful interaction, where objects can talk to us,” predicts Cleries, a field of innovation that may draw on augmented reality and prompted a recent MoMa exhibition.

We’ll want these interactions to be “more poetic, more human, more mindful” says Cleries. The Neuroflowers project, and technologies such as digital mapping, colour lighting and therapeutic light canopies will contribute to this sense of emotive living. “Our homes will be therapeutic, a sort of emotional spa, a mood-regulating space that provides more mindful living.”

The growth of organic tech

In tandem with this playful, therapeutic smartness will be the rapidly evolving use of hybrid tech: part engineering, part biology. Cleries predicts great things from the already-progressive use of fungi, bacteria and live organisms that are increasingly allowing us to live ethical, self sufficient and eco-conscious home lives – “mainly in our activities related to bath and kitchen.”

How do/will these changes affect our sense of self, our behavior? “We will be more conscious of ourselves as living organisms, more conscious of our impact on the planet. We will grow our clothes, and our food, through the use of bacteria and other organisms. Our homes will be part of the nature cycle, built around the concept of cradle-to-cradle, a sort of new revolution in considering our physical space as part of nature.”

This is a field that Professor Rachel Armstrong – coordinator for the Living Architecture project (LIAR) – is expert in. The organic ‘programmable’ bricks Armstrong and co are engineering are based on microbial fuel cell fed by grey water, and will be multi-functional: extracting electricity from their home system using biofilms; producing clean water; providing a range of products from reclaimed phosphate to a new generation of biodegradable soap that improves on existing ones.

“So, imagine now a house that no longer relies on fossil fuels for heating, lighting and waste disposal but is a whole physiology of living organic interactions. Philips Microbial Home/kitchen has already speculated on this kind of future but had not really networked metabolisms; the project was conjectural, but we’re actually making these computational units.

“This is a different kind of computing than digital computing, but we fully expect that they will interface with mechanical and digital systems. [These will produce] cyborg homes that can respond to changes in living spaces; they’ll need feeding, [they’ll need] to excrete and may even have a certain kind of ‘intelligence’ that we may currently expect to find in a garden, responding to seasonal changes, or changes in the kinds of food we eat.”

Living in a cyborg home

Imagine a future, ask Armstrong, where we replace our dry boilers with liquid metabolic ones; where we have digesters, not batteries; circulations, not waste water outlets; breathing systems, not vents.

“Our homes will increasingly be like strange cyborg bodies and have the personality of a garden rather than the casing of a dry machine.”

Our homes will increasingly be like strange cyborg bodies and have the personality of a garden rather than the casing of a dry machine.

We’ll find that our living infrastructures will have a different kind of presence in our homes, says Armstrong.

“They will make different sounds – like stomachs rather than like flame-throwers. They will not produce smells because they’ll be in sealed environments. When they leak, it might be like sewage or body odour – which is not exactly pleasant. But in contrast, when industrial boilers leak they make odourless gases that kill like carbon monoxide.

“Maybe there will be a kind of antibiotic to give to some of these ailments; maybe it’ll need a dose of vitamins and minerals, or more sunlight. The ‘complaints’ these systems might have are more like tummy upsets than industrial leaks of environmental poisons. They’ll also produce, not just consume things.

“Your metabolic boiler might actually make you money – not just save you money. You might be able to trade particular kinds of biomass, make alcohol, or sugar, or soap. Each person will be able to program their metabolic boiler to make products that are suitable to them. You might even grow fish in these tanks or raise aquacultures, so they provide food.”

The house that feeds

The fresh water produced by these boilers would be more than suitable for species of fish, says Armstrong.

“And if you decided to have salt water spaces then you might culture bioluminescent bacteria or algae in them, so that the whole watery system glows at dark at night when shaken by the passages of footsteps as they step on judder boards near by that transmit vibrations to the tanks, which stirs the glow-in-the-dark organisms and turns them on.

“We might find that we have biodigital interfaces in these environments, so that sensors can create feedback looks of environmental information that regulate flow, or automatically rotate a tank towards the light through simple robotics. They could also provide entertainment, so it doesn’t have to be all biology – anything that could be in a tank to provide entertainment could be integrated into these metabolic burners too.”

“Think of how you might consider a tank of fish,” says Armstrong. “You might watch them for ages, hypnotised and relaxed. You might enjoy feeding them, or caring for them, give them names. There is something wonderful about watching water and you may really find your metabolic boiler like watching a lava lamp.”

Waste will be discreetly hidden behind a ceramic panel, says Armstrong. “These panels are likely to get hot, so they’ll be the place you lean against in winter. They can also be very decorative and may bring about a new wave in developing ceramic technologies.”

As Gaudy’s famous sculptures illustrate, ceramics can offer so much more than uniform squares and rectangles. “Imagine what it might be like to have a metabolic boiler that was also a beautiful wall or centerpiece in your home; it could be absolutely spectacular. It’s about our imaginations, the kinds of experiences we want in our houses and just how bold we’re prepared to be with our creativity.”

New home, new life

Integrating these new, hybrid infrastructures will require a degree of change and effort on our part, points out Cleries.

“We will have to devote more time to taking care of our homes, in the same way we take care of a garden. But we will have some kind of ethical, economical and self-sufficiency – independence from big energy corporations – as a reward. Water will be a key and precious asset in this.”

The pay-offs in these future homes – the practical and psychological – will no doubt make any periods of transition worth it. Instead of thinking of our homes as lifeless and inert, brick-and-mortar spaces that were built by others without our individual needs in mind, we’ll have a more intimate, nuanced, creative and symbiotic relationship with our homes.

As Cleries and Armstrong point out, its time we update and expand our visions of what the future home can be. The Jetsons-style abode – with its retro-futuristic, raygun-style aesthetic – is old news.

Our future homes will look to nature as much as tech. They’ll be smart and emotional, a synthesis of synthetic and naturally-occurring – a tech-savvy return to Eden.