Are you a Nomad or a Settler?

CR editor Patrick Burgoyne recently took part in a salon event hosted by Flamingo’s Cultural Intelligence in partnership with Shelter and Smoke Creative (the team behind Shelter’s biannual magazine ‘Here’) to probe how our relationship with the home is undergoing a dramatic shift

Inspired in part by the CR October ‘Home’ issue, four panelists: Andre Anderson, writer and driving force behind the ‘Authors of the Estate’ project, journalist Raul Vera who has written extensively about life for those at the fringes, Naomi Cleaver, author, The Joy of Home and presenter of Channel 4’s Other People’s Houses‎ and Grand Designs Trade Secrets joined Patrick Burgoyne, to debate whether the future is in the hands of the Nomad or the Settler.

We’ve heard a lot recently about the ‘digital nomad’, of how society is ‘always on’, consuming everything on the go, (particularly when it comes to marketing trends). It’s easy to overlook the home in all this excitement. The aim of the evening was to redress that imbalance, to give our understanding of ‘the home’ a bit of a revamp.

Raul Vera talked about how the consequences of the UK’s housing market has led to new approaches toward the home, including ‘property guardians’ and those living in unusual spaces such as canal boats. Thus, the concept of being a ‘settler’ may be moving from something exclusively staid and traditional to a concept that may involve adventure, excitement and even a little danger. And Naomi Cleaver talked about how the spaces she has been involved in designing often include shared areas for cooking, eating and mingling, making home life much more social.

And so what of the home itself ­– is this in turn being influenced by the ways of the nomad? Certainly when it comes to home working, yes. Remember all those home offices which we had fitted in the 90s? Well it turns out that people don’t like being tethered to a specific room in the house anymore. A recent study by office furniture brand, Coalesce which looked in detail at the habits of 16 workers in creative fields and found that whilst they all had home offices, none of them used them to work. In fact they used them for storage. Now we have W

WI-Fee and neat little laptops, we want to work wherever we feel best. This might be at the kitchen table, lying in bed or curled up on the sofa with one eye on the kids.

In fact when you think about other activities in the home, why should these be assigned to certain spaces or ascribed to specific pieces of furniture either? We can watch media from those same laptops wherever we choose to open them. Likewise the coffee table and sofa are fast becoming a site for informal dining. Increasingly we are starting to see people acting like nomads within their own homes.

Certainly what the panel wasn’t advocating was a need to re-erect the walls we’ve just been knocking down in our newly open plan homes. Something the Brits are very fond of: One in three homes now features a kitchen-diner, and one in five Britons plans to blend their separate living room and cooking spaces into a single area according to a Lloyd TBS Home Insurance survey.

Instead, this increased freedom within the home brings with it an increased responsibility. It requires us to live more consciously in our homes. To decide the way we want to be and set our own boundaries around that. Technology, furniture, design, these all help but one resounding conclusion of the evening’s debate was that much of the onus is on the individual to manage how they get there

Source: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2015/november/are-you-a-nomad-or-a-settler/