During this Covid-19 pandemic, I earned free time to finish overdue projects. While I was looking through the photos from our 2018 road trip, I was thinking about the meaning of home. For almost 12 days, a van became our home. The trip started by renting a van, spent 2 nights camp-out in the freezing weather, and continued by visiting a lot of unique places and people.
While imagining these memories in my head, I compared a van home with the stay-at-home order and the contrast between them made me think about “What is home? Or Where is home?”. Home is a subject with a lot of explications without any doubt. The aim of the road trip was to take us from home to places, which couldn’t be home, but the van made us think about each stop as a temporary home.
These days that the world is dealing with the Covid-19 crisis; many things around us are changing. These changes cause us to miss our normal life. We spend a lot of time at home. Our homes become our temporary shelters. This situation brings our attention to appreciate our routine activities; being in open public places, eating in cafes and restaurants with our friends, and many more are luxurious and seem impossible at this moment. Even activities with fewer exposure risks like walking, biking, and enjoying parks are not recommended and discouraged to control the coronavirus.
Home has been important for us and nowadays it is the only place we spend our time. In general, everyone’s perception of home is different from each other, but I think there could be three types of relationships between people and home. For some people, a home is a place to sleep--period. This group spends most of the time out of the home. For the second group, they have a strong bond to their home and this crisis becomes a gift for them to rejoice their relationship with home. For the last group, there is not a clear line between home and everywhere else that is not home. For this group, home doesn’t have a physical meaning and everywhere can be called home. Regardless of which group we belong to, every single one of us should stay home right now, and find a way to enjoy it. The question is whether our homes are designed to transfer joyfulness.
As a designer who designs places for people to live and enjoy, I am thinking about how we can create a space to cope with staying at it for a long time and handle the mental effects of it. Are people, who live in dense urban areas, low-income neighborhoods, slums, and camps, having the same perception of home as people, who are living in areas with easy access to nature, parks or at least a small yard? In dense areas, people are lucky if they see a different view rather than the window of the next building. In these areas that the access to the outside, nature, and open spaces is limited or impossible, what a home could potentially offer? I think our current homes lost their meaning and function to fast development. Our homes are a stack of boxes either on top of each other or sprawl without any sense of the connection to its surroundings in the suburbia. And that is obvious that we need a new hybrid view to create our homes and what is outside of it with harmony to each other but not separated and disrupted.
I think these days we are passengers of a van home and the temporariness of this transition makes this staying-at-home order tolerable but should we really ignore this fact that our homes are not designed to be enjoyable? The question I am asking myself is how we can change our designs to extend the functionalities of our home beyond typical functions. We need to make a van home, our home, it is enjoyable not because of seeing new places but in fact, because it is enjoyable by itself.