Living Green in a Small Space

Why you or someone you care about has decided to live in a tiny home influences what you can do to make living in one a pleasant experience.

Some of the reasons that people live in tiny homes or work in small spaces include:

• The affordable alternatives are awful. Running life or work from a small space is often cheaper than other options available (i.e., paying for more square feet).  It can be inexpensive to share, but sharing requires identification of a compatible other, and sometimes those are quite scarce indeed—for any number of reasons, because of issues you have with them or (gulp) they have with you.  And when you live on your own you have much more control over how you do actually live.
• You want to be green. Living or working small can potentially be an Earth friendly use of resources.
• You like a challenge. You are the sort of person who revels in finding a way pack a raw egg in a cardboard box so that it can be dropped out of a second story window without breaking.  The idea of figuring out how to pack all of the things we seem to need for modern life into a few square feet less than are found in the average modern bathroom captivates you.  Similarly, you may enjoy unique things—and tiny homes and workplaces, especially done livably, aren’t too common.

If you’re using a tiny space to live green you’ll favour a slightly different set of solutions to optimize life there than someone who is trying to save money or satiate the need to resolve a continuing series of challenges.

In Designing Pleasurable Products (Taylor and Francis, 2000) Patrick Jordan identifies four different sorts of positive experiences design can bestow.  Whatever your reason for living or working small, doing so can and should brighten your life in the ways he reports.  It needs to provide

• Physio-pleasure – sensory and ergonomic experiences need to be well managed. No twisted spines as you type, no stinky stinks as you go about your life, etc.
• Socio-pleasure – giving you the opportunity to spend time with others when you want to, how you want to (well, at least as within the realm of logical possibilities, no luxury yacht-like hanging-outs unless you can afford them, etc.) and sending messages to others about you that you want them to get (They’re a great problem solver! They are good at keeping budgets in check!  They care about the Earth! or something else entirely.)
• Psycho-pleasure – so your mind functions effectively and you understand how to do what must be done—whether that’s turn on the stove or change the lights when you’re trying to concentrate—and systems in place do what they promise, whether that’s related to heating/cooling or printing out reports.
• Ideo-pleasure – which means you can live consistent with your values, whether those include a love of classical music, valuing the highest aesthetic standards, always working to a very high level, or being the greenest person possible.