The Information Age, brought on by the invention of the Internet in conjunction with that of the smart phone, has had a major toll on the psyche of the human being. Leo Babauta, author of The Power of Less, states that “there has never before been an age in which we could get so much done so quickly. There also has never before been an age in which we were so overwhelmed with information and tasks, so overloaded with e-mails and things to read and watch, so stressed by the incredible demands of our lives.” Although this technological revolution has greatly improved our lives, our need for permanent connectivity to the Internet and other people has impacted our ability to control the amount of information that comes our way and consequently, the amount we process. Therefore, it is imperative for us to learn the art of setting limits. Limitations are not meant to be seen as a hindrance but instead as an opportunity; they force us to choose the essential elements that have the most impact on our lives so that we have room and time for the activities that are important to us.
Babauta provides a series of guidelines to help with the selection of the essential elements for short-term and long-term tasks:
"1. What are your values? Every action in your life should follow these values.
2. What are your goals?
3. What do you love?
4. What is important to you in life and work?
5. What has the biggest impact?
6. What has the most long-term impact?
7. What are your needs versus wants?
8. Eliminate the nonessential.
9. Continue to edit process until you find the right balance."
To achieve this minimal way of living, there must be limits set for the architectural creation of our homes as well as the items that go in them. In our market-driven economy, developers convince prospective home owners that they need bigger homes to be happier in order to maximize their own income, but land is expensive and we do not need as much space as we think we do. Thus, as for the architectural creation of the house, we have to minimize its square footage. Less built space requires less material usage and results in lower energy consumption, therefore providing a more sustainable way of living. Darrick Borowski, creative director of Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture, employs effective strategies to promote this way of living: “‘We distill our clients' basic functions — the eating, sleeping, cooking, entertaining graph — into a clear priority set and turn the priorities into space requirements." Then, they "investigate the overlaps that inevitably informs the design.”
The next step towards achieving a minimalistic home involves eliminating the clutter in an individual’s life by limiting the number of items that are around him, monitoring future purchases, and continuing this editing process on a long-term basis. Leo Babauta believes that if an individual has too many items in his house, he should limit himself to two hundred items so that only the most valuable and meaningful items remain in his life. If there are products that we do not use on a day-to-day, weekly, or, at the most, monthly basis, we will never use them so why not get rid of them?
A step further would be the investment in multi-functional products. Mike Elgan, author of the article, “How Portability Can Make You Happier at Home,” is a specialist in mobile living because he has had to move 15 times within a 25 year period. He believes that “designing your home and your life around maximum portability means favoring small things over larger ones, fewer things over more and multipurpose objects over single-purpose ones.” Perhaps an even further step is creating a conversation between the architecture and the products that go in the space to encourage more product elimination. A small scale example is something as simple as implementing a rotating mini-partition with a mounted TV so that the TV could be shared between two rooms. Another example is a dining table that converts to a shelf, as shown to the right.
