Chapter 1: Introduction A Domestic Future

摘要

This joint research project between Daiwa House and the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) began with a simple but broad question: What is the future of our living environment? The research coincides with a renewed interest in the future not seen since the 1960s. Over the past 50 years, the market for future studies, predictive modeling, and forecasting has expanded both in terms of approach and application across a range of fields and industries. But the inherent flaw of prediction is its examination of present conditions as a way of projecting an unknown future. For this reason, predictions are both abstract and contingent. Predictive modelling works by using historical and realtime factors that can vary in real life, quantifying them, and projecting them onto the future. However, because not all factors can be both known in the present and the future, there is an inevitable process of estimation, selection and weighing. If more factors are included to improve accuracy, predictions become vague, broad and limited to the near future.