Research shows that in 2019 we spent up to 90% of our day indoors. In 2020, this number was sometimes reaching even 100%. We live in unstable, yet vibrant times. Pandemics, economic crises, climate change, and a lack of natural resources including fertile soil are some of the challenges we must face, act upon, and adapt to.
These struggles are causing a combination of stress and isolation, and they take a huge toll on our welfare. Therefore, after the era of outsourcing daily activities and goods in the city, many of us are now rediscovering the need to create healthier and more sustainable spaces in our private and shared homes.
Together with an amazing team of designers, we have created a sustainable space in Szczecin (Poland) for IKEA, called the Home of Tomorrow. This is a home of the near future, in which we can grow our own food, fix household items instead of buying new ones, improve our circadian rhythm, learn and teach. This space is currently open for visitors and holds many workshops about circularity and a more sustainable lifestyle.
The team responsible for bringing the design to life was Gustaw Jakubowski, Marketing Manager at IKEA Poland and Must Be Loud, a creative agency that was responsible for the entire undertaking. The architectural side of the project was led by Justyna Puchalska, supported by Joanna Jurga, and I was in charge of what I love the most - sustainable, innovative, and healthy solutions for interiors, interior landscaping, and home farming.
In this article, I would like to present how some of these green and healthy solutions can be incorporated into coliving spaces, based on some of the solutions that were utilised in the Home of Tomorrow project. I will also share links to several open-source assembly kits that we have created along the way!
Back to basics
Our wellbeing is, amongst many things, dependent on having a balanced diet and a proper sleeping pattern. Those two core elements of wellbeing are possible to maintain and enhance in coliving spaces and are the ones we will focus on in this article. I will give examples of how a balanced diet can be obtained by growing your own fresh microgreens, veggies, and herbs indoors with the use of simple hydroponic and aeroponics techniques as well as how sleeping patterns can be improved by properly adjusting light sources with certain therapeutic properties that I will share below.
Growing food in your coliving Space
First, let’s start with food: our current consumption patterns are accelerating climate change and the degradation of both land and marine habitats, and we need to figure out how to make some of the alternatives more mainstream. In the House of Tomorrow, we played around with some of the following innovations:
Food Farms
Urban farming is often seen as large scale rooftop gardens or laboratory-style industrial containers with bright purple grow lights. But I would like to assure you, if you’d like to start to grow your own food at home, all you will need is a sunny windowsill and a shelf with a grow light. It is better to start with simple, smaller scale farm models, then gradually develop your skills and become a home growing expert!
Microgreens
The easiest to farm at home are microgreens, the vegetable seedlings that develop the first leaves. Usually, it takes around ten days from seeding to harvest and they are packed with nutrients. For example, microgreens such as red cabbage, cilantro, and radish contain up to 40 times higher levels of vital nutrients than their mature counterparts. Here is an easy to use instruction manual on how to create your own microgarden, which is rich in nutrients, flavors, and vivid colors. Moreover, it is a good idea to create a seed storage in a common kitchen, for example. You can just choose a dark and dry cabinet, where you can store and label your organic seeds.
Aeroponics
This type of farming uses only 5% of water compared to traditional farming. It is not only efficient but also easy to assemble. In aeroponic farms, it is possible to grow tuberous vegetables like potatoes and carrots and rhizomes like ginger and turmeric (known fortheir anti-inflammatory properties). In this system, you can use artificial fertilisers, but I would also recommend using natural vermicompost tea. Mix it in 1:20 proportions with the water. Before pouring the tap water into the system, you have to leave it out for a day, for chlorine to ‘off-gas’. Also, maintaining the right pH level is very important: most veggies thrive in pH levels of 5,5 to 6,5, and you measure and adjust this by adding base or acid from a ‘pH control kit’. It is worth mentioning that you will have to change the water each week, which you can reuse for your home plants and/ or gardens. Remember also to clean the box and the mist diffuser with vinegar, which is a good and eco- friendly substance.
Mood Food
There are certain types of foods that we can grow at home, which stimulate the creation of certain neurotransmitters and hormones that have a positive impact on our mood and wellbeing. For example, spirulina and shitake mushrooms are a great source of L-tryptophan and 5-HTP respectively. Both amino acids are essential for the biosynthesis of serotonin, a neurotransmitter responsible for modulating mood, cognition, and learning. A proper amount of serotonin is responsible for fighting depression, as well as sleeping disorders. We will talk about it further below. Spirulina farms are super easy to assemble and maintain on a sunny window. For a fresh batch of shiitake mushrooms, I suggest acquiring ready- made cultivation kits, to reduce the possibility of mold infection (creating your own bale of mushshrooms requires a lot of sterility from the start!).
Just setting up several racks of these micro-farms in the common kitchen or other common areas won’t make the entire building self-sufficient in regards to the food supply. But it can add a whole new layer to your experience - you not only create a green community that is more aware of sustainable food production, but you also add additional nutrients to the dishes that your community shares. You can even think of designing a fully sustainable kitchen for coliving: a kitchen that is energy-efficient, with less waste, saves water and allows you to grow healthy food (automatically or manually). Something like this can be not only an ecologically wise move but also a factor that builds a community of more conscious and healthy residents. Currently, I’m also working on a similar solution for the dep.artment, an experimental housing project in Oslo.
Lighting up your coliving space
Besides quality food, light is also an extremely important element for maintaining our wellbeing.
For billions of years of evolution, life has become influenced and synchronized with the external environment and rhythmically-occurring factors, such as the day and night cycle. In other words, life exists in harmony with the main source of light, the sun. Our biological bodies still follow the same rules.
It means that they are super sensitive to changes in temperature and intensity of the light. We feel more awake when the light around us is bright, and sleepy when the illumination gets dim or completely dark. Therefore, during the day we are more active, our bodies’ temperature rises. But, in the night everything slows down: our breathing, heart rates, and the body’s temperature decreases (that is why we often sleep better in colder rooms). This alteration of our body’s sleep and wakefulness is called the “physiological day-night cycle” or circadian rhythm (from Latin ‘circa dies’ = about one day).
One of the questions I’d like to raise here is how can we achieve the same benefit from artificial light that we can with natural light. Below I share some of the innovations I have been experimenting with:
Artificial light as a medicine
What do we know about artificial lighting? Humans started to control fire hundreds of thousands of years ago and have used it ever since. Thomas Edison patented his lightbulb in 1880. The LED light was invented in the 1960s. Because of these innovations, we became culturally and economically independent of the day-night cycle. But our brains and bodies are still anchored to these natural cycles. By artificially prolonging our day thanks to LED technology, and by spending almost the entire of our days indoors (resulting in reduced exposure to the sun’s UV-B radiation and vital nutrients and vitamins), we get a bit or completely unhappy, weak, and often sick.
Therefore it is super important to try to imitate these cycles by creating conditions within our buildings that resemble the act of waking up and going to sleep with the sun. We can achieve this with artificial light sources, but scientists are now discussing which colors of the light are best to be awake and to fall asleep. They all agree that we have to pay attention to the brightness and duration of the exposure to the light source.
In short, when we expose our retinas to artificial bright light our brain takes it as a ‘physiological day’. Conversely, when we expose ourselves to dimming light our brain plunges slowly into a ‘physiological night’. These physiological shifts are super important to sustain our circadian rhythm and hence healthy sleeping patterns.
Bright Light
Exposure to bright light not only makes us more active but also increases the serotonin levels in our bodies, which simply makes us happier. Therefore it is important to spend some time outdoors during the sunny days, but when it is not possible we can use SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps. These lamps emulate the sun’s intensity and color temperature. For the Home of Tomorrow, I designed one of the biggest SAD lamps in the world, which is a 3.65 m high and 3,0m long structure. This specialised SAD lamp emits super bright light and UVB range wavelength several times per day, which is beneficial for the synthesis of vitamin D3, which improves the body’s immunity.
In the evenings the lamp flashes for an hour with a warm sunset-like color. During the day sessions, when our team tested it some of us felt super energised and the others were fully immersed in a blissful feeling of joy. In coliving common spaces, it would be perfect to utilise such a solution to bring a daily collective experience of repose and happiness, which in current times is so important for us to stay on track both mentally and physically.
The small secret of SAD lamps is not only the intensity of the illumination but the amount of blue light. This color constitutes the biggest fraction of natural sunlight. Therefore it is also the main ingredient of indoor sun replicas. When blue wavelengths reach our retinas, our alertness increases, memory improves, cognitive functions are strengthened, and our mood elevates. It happens because blue light suppresses the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone.
Therefore, in the morning or during the day, when we need to be active, we should use intense blue or cool white light (at least 4000K) in our rooms or in common spaces.
Dim light
But what light is the best before sleep ? The answer is: dim light or no light at all. It is crucial to remember to switch off all the bulbs before going to bed. Even a small amount of light left on can have an impact on our sleep and therefore start to alter our circadian rhythm. During the evening the serotonin acquired during the day is synthesized into melatonin. To improve this conversion we should include in our diet foods rich in Pantothenic Acid (Vitamin B5). The best source of these vitamins are the previously mentioned shiitake mushrooms.
Is technology the solution?
So what about cell phones, laptops, and all the screens we encounter daily that emit a huge amount of blue light that constantly keeps us alert? We can no longer say to others that “look, you have to read books and have no screen time in the evening”. Nowadays we are emotionally and economically attached to technology. We have multiple research and data- driven conclusions that night exposure to blue light is not healthy for us, but it is a new normal, to which we are adapting. Technology makes us more efficient, informed and virtually present in multiple locations. It always was and is an artificial extension of our bodies, which amplifies our abilities but also takes a toll on our biology and the natural environment. Therefore in order to use technology wisely in coliving spaces we should never forget about the rhythms of the natural world, and design shared indoor environments according to it.
