Letter to the next resident of Casa Jasmina

Dear next guest of Casa Jasmina,

Welcome to your new temporary home.

Please note: This is a cross-post from the GitHub repo for letters from one resident of Casa Jasmina to the next. For more context, jump on over to this blog post about my visit to Casa Jasmina.

We’re writing this letter to share some of our experiences, and hope to provide some helpful cues to make your stay the best it can be. Also, as the first “official” guests at CJ we hope we can start a tradition in leaving a message to the next person or group coming in – as a service to the next resident, as an archive and log book that might provide interesting research signals later on, and as a sort of social continuum that connects all residents to CJ and to one another.

Casa Jasmina is the connected home of the future. It’s a home first, connected second. Also, it’s not just any home, but yours. Make yourself at home, use it (yes, the food in the fridge is for you, too), and if something strikes you as not-quite-there-yet, go ahead and feel free to tweak it. This is what CJ is all about. In case you were wondering – yes, our lovely hosts are totally ok with it!

When we first arrived at CJ, we knew we wanted not just to hang out in this home of the future, but also contribute something. This letter is a first step; there are a few other small bits & pieces that we proposed/started to implement. It’s up to you to decide if you want to continue with the things we kicked off or go another route entirely. It’s ok either way!

We also installed a kind of Casa Jasmina SCRUM board (it’s currently on the side of one of the kitchen cupboards) to collect ideas, challenges, opportunities for CJ, or simply little things that need fixing. Feel free to add what you notice to the board, or take on a challenge from the “to make” section, move it to the “making” section and get crackin’. Nothing beats the feeling of the “made” section filling up as the place evolves. As everything here, this is a test. If you like it, let’s keep it. If not, no worries.

Also, this is a home, but it’s also a meta home of sorts. Being aware of what CJ does, could/shoud/might be, and how your interaction with the space works is super interesting. We’re all curious. Share your experiences online for all the others who haven’t had a chance to live in the future?

This smart home of the future hasn’t tried to kill us while we slept. Quite the opposite: we found the stay at CJ very pleasant; maybe more so than Jasmina would appreciate. After all, this is a place to live on the bleeding edge of the hyper-connected future. It’s not supposed to be convenient and lull us in, it’s designed to challenge us and our perceptions. It’s full of artefacts from various futures that can (and should) be interrogated, questioned, recontextualized, and just plainly used.

We found it’s also a place that inspires discussions till late into the night, be it around the gloriously fabbed OpenDesk, the not-yet-very-connected kitchen or out on the rooftop in between future rooftop gardens. You’ll sleep well afterwards knowing that just next door a giant robot keeps watch while its little Roomba brother runs it perpetual cleaning errands throughout Casa Jasmina.

We’d love to learn what you think of the place, and wish you a great stay in your new temporary home.

Peter Bihr, Michelle Thorne & Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

ps. A few very practical pointers to make your day easier:

  • There’s a little café just across the street when you walk out of Via Egeo for a coffee and croissant in the morning.
  • For close-by lunch and dinner, there’s a little neighborhood restaurant when you head out of Via Egeo and turn right into Corso Filippo Turati. Note that lunch time is 13-14h sharp…
  • If you need any tools or something, the FabLab crew downstairs is super nice and helpful. Just knock the door, they’ll be able to hook you up with just about anything. (Or maybe just fab it for you on the spot.)

Leave a Reply