Disney's "Back to the Future" of Housing

That line from the classic movie, The Graduate shows a scene from Benjamin’s graduation party. “It’s plastics, my boy – now there’s the future . . ., ” was indeed a sign of the times when the movie was made in 1967. In fact, the 1957 Monsanto 'Plastics Home of the Future' at the original Anaheim Disneyland provided a practical demonstration of the almost limitless potential of plastics in structural applications.

Advanced design innovations included an "Atoms for Living Kitchen" featuring micro-wave cooking and ultra-sonic dishwashing, and telephones with preset and push-button dialing, "hands-free" speakers and transmitters, and even a viewing screen to see the person who is calling.

The pseudo-home’s modular bathrooms had the sink (where you’d find an electric toothbrush…), tub, walls and floor molded in units, and rigid urethane plastic foam was used for insulation and structural strength with flexible urethane foam used for cushioning furniture and rugs.

The climate control center filtered, cooled, heated and scented the air in each room independently while "Acrillan" acrylic fiber and Chemsbrand nylon was used for upholstery, draperies and carpeting.

At the time, Disney built its House of Tomorrow prognosticating what homebuyers might see in the way of home technology 30 or 40 years hence. The new House of Tomorrow—known this time as the Innoventions Dream Home opened recently at the same theme park, but interestingly enough, purposefully peers only five or so years over the future due to the speed of technology change. The creators of the housing prototype boast that a full 60 percent of the home technologies installed there are available today, but it is also referencing how America’s homebuilders will be approaching their work in the future.

Collaborating with HP, Lifeware, and Microsoft for the project, Disney's builder partner for the project, Taylor Morrison, plans to use this template to guide them in building homes once the current slump ends. The Dream Home is actually a complex laboratory outfitted as a theme park attraction. Visitors can interact with the home’s systems, helped along by a family of actors knowledgeable about the technologies and products – kind of like a “consumer” trade show on steroids.

Sources tell us that when visitors play with the remotes and other controllers through an array of interactive tabletop displays, wall-mounted touch screens, and virtual bulletin boards in just about every room of the house., the input is recorded as data. That data will be combined with input from kiosks that ask visitors’ opinions about the house, as well as information from conventional live exit surveys. By the time the five-year partnership concludes, it just could be that the way houses will be designed and built may have changed as a result of the knowledge gained.

Aside from digital home automation, streaming media, and gobs of other techno-fabulous goodies, courtesy of Microsoft, HP, and technology integrator LifeWare, visitors will delight in digital photo albums, appliances that "talk" to each other, magic mirrors, and wireless -- everything. The house even has rooms that "recognize" individual family members and morph their surroundings (changing, for example, temperature, lighting, artwork on the walls, and music on the sound system) according to the taste of whomever is occupying the room.

Disney’s Innoventions house may be a far cry from the original Tomorrowland house, but it’s every bit as fascinating to those of us who stand in awe of technology and how personal it has become.