"Hydroponics and Housing for the 21st Century"

Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

Abraham Maslow, a psychologist from America in the mid-20th Century, developed the idea of a "hierarchy of needs" that must be met, in a specific order, for humans to develop into complete beings. To wit:

Maslow maintained that our most basic need is for physiological survival: shelter, warmth, food, drink, and so on. Once these physiological needs are met, individuals then are able to address the need for safety and security, including freedom from danger and absence of threat. Once safety has been assured, belonging or love, which is usually found within families, friendships, membership in associations, and within the community, then becomes a priority. Maslow stressed that only when we are anchored in community do we develop self-esteem, the need to assure ourselves of our own worth as individuals. Maslow claimed that the need for self-esteem can be met through mastery or achievement in a given field or through gaining respect or recognition from others. Once the need for self-esteem has been largely met, Maslow stated, we will develop a new restlessness and the urge to pursue the unique gifts or talents that may be particular to that person. As Maslow stated, "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at ultimate peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature" [Maslow, A. (1970). Motivation and Personality (2nd ed.) p. 48 - New York: Harper & Row]. Maslow referred to this final level of need as "Self-Actualization." [Kunc, 1992]

Maslow's Hierarchy is often represented as a pyramid (See Fig. 1), to show the levels of progression in human development. Food comes in at the very bottom level. There are various interpretations of the hierarchy, with subdivisions of the general types based upon scale of need. For example, in physiological survival, humans need air first and foremost. Without it, they will perish within minutes. Warmth (depending on local climate) would probably come next, followed by water, sleep, food, shelter, etc. Each of these has a longer time-period that a person can go without before death occurs.

As one progresses up the pyramid, one begins to wonder: "How long can a person go without self-esteem?" Certainly, it's not as life-threatening as lack of food, water, or air. Yet just as certainly, it has some detrimental effect upon their development. A quick scan of the television or radio channels will provide seemingly endless examples of current social problems, urban decay, poor education standards, etc. Again, the above question may come to mind. "How long?" The consequences are plain to see, and yet, according to Maslow's Hierarchy, these social and political problems may have a more deep-seated root, farther down the pyramid.

To put it bluntly, a person who's going around with a grumbling stomach, wondering where their next meal is coming from, is not going to be concerned about doing their Civic Duty. To be homeless on the street, with no chance of being admitted to most of the restaurants they can see, is almost like rubbing salt into a wound. Their brain is quite literally being short-circuited by the message of FOOD-FOOD-FOOD-FOOD and there is little time for other ideas to enter.

To tell a homeless person to "get a job" is to talk to them on completely the wrong level. That's a 4th-tier, "self-esteem/achievement" message, being passed to a 1st-tier, "physiological need" brain-state. The homeless person has to deal with meeting all of their physiological needs (of which there are four or five, as noted above), then move on to meeting their safety needs. After that, they need to feel that they belong; that they have friends and loved ones. Then, and ONLY then, will their brain be in a proper state to receive the message about getting a job and joining up with societal structure. Before then, you might as well be jabbering at them in some alien tongue, because they aren't going to process what you're saying as anything important to the goal of meeting their immediate needs.

This does not apply only to the homeless, or only to Americans. It is a general trend in human development. We can see the same effect in many areas. Underdeveloped Third-World countries are concerned with subsistence farming, scavenging, or sometimes even eating insects just to survive, and thus they are too preoccupied to be bothered with things like learning computers, writing web pages, or building space colonies. In Middle Eastern countries, food supply is reasonably well assured, but the issue at hand is safety. People spend much of their time worrying about terrorist attacks, and wondering where the next bomb will go off. Thus, they can't devote as much time to building coffee-houses, educational centers, or art institutes.

As cultures become more established, their primary needs are met, and they begin to develop the higher social organs of a society. Education becomes widespread, food is plentiful, housing widely available and affordable. Art, music, and culture begin to flow. What we see, in essence, is that the lower tiers of the pyramid are being met for a larger and larger portion of the population, and thus a great majority of the people flourish. They don't just survive, they don't just live, they _thrive_. It's important to note the distinction between those three states. They all deal with the act of living, but each one signifies a different level of development, based upon available resources.

This closely mirrors the hydroponic environment with respect to plants, and so we see another general trend. When an organism is given the resources it needs to function, and is supplied them, not in bare minimums, but in abundance, and when its wastes are removed effectively from the localized area to be reprocessed into the environment efficiently, then the organism will thrive. (The reader is encouraged to review the figures for tomatoes in Table 1 for a case-in-point example of the difference between "living" and "thriving.")

The Role of the House in Human Development

Traditionally, the house has provided most of the functions of Maslow's Hierarchy. Food was grown in the garden, water came from a well or stream, (and more recently, from pipes), warmth from the hearth, shelter from the walls, and privacy from the very space surrounding the house. (This is the "elbow room" of the rural regions, when your nearest neighbor is sometimes several kilometers away.) The family lived and gathered in the home, provided feelings of love, belonging, acceptance, and provided resources for personal growth, exploration, and learning (to a point...then it became time to "leave the nest.")

In many ways, industrial society has fractured the home, replacing gardens with grocery stores and convenience markets. Water comes from the faucet, warmth from a radiator or furnace vent. The walls of many apartments provide little shelter from the sounds of neighbors going about their lives, and in cities people are seldom away from the sounds of sirens and traffic. In fact, individuals seldom get time away from _other people_. Still, they are most likely away from extended family, and the need for acceptance is transferred from family and loved ones to the workplace. Shared experience often comes from watching the same TV shows as friends, and then talking about them while at work.

In this way, it seems that the underlying fabric of society's psychological makeup (tiers one and two of Maslow's pyramid), the very home that we live in, has become fractured and dysfunctional. The house itself may have become a slightly toxic part of our existence. For if we get up in the morning, leave for work, come home at night exhausted to a place we're not all that fond of, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow, then what kind of life are we leading? How much of that can a person take before it begins to have detrimental effects on their psychological state? How many people like that can a society take before it begins to wear thin and fray at the edges?

The Problem Restated as Design Specification

How can we formulate an environment for human beings that provides for their health, happiness, safety, shelter, space, food, and water requirements, gives them adequate information resources to encourage intellectual growth, and provides enough space for privacy, "elbow room", and peace of mind?

Such an environment should not strive simply to meet the bare minimum requirements, but should provide an abundance of resources to encourage thriving. It should be a veritable cornucopia for them to draw from. (Variety is the spice of life.) Such an environment must provide for human wastes, and take care of them in an intelligent, and eco-friendly manner.

The house should not depend solely on outside sources for its needs. While it may make sense to plug into a power grid when available, it should also be able to generate its own power. When attached to a grid, it can sell off any surplus power and make a profit for the residents. Water may come from a hookup to local pipes, may be drawn from a local stream, pond or lake, harvested from rainfall, or perhaps even condensed out of the very air. It can be purified on-board, and stored for future use. Heat can obviously be harvested from the sun when in sunny areas, and should also come from other sources. Electric heat can be generated cleanly, and electricity is readily available from a variety of power-generation systems which can be kept on-board and intertwined. These may include fuel-cells, photovoltaics ("solar cells"), windmill generators, and deployable mini-hydroelectric turbines for houses near running water.

Food may come from a local store, although fresh vegetables and grains should always be available from a hydroponic garden within the house. Enough food can be grown in 125 square feet of hydroponic space to feed a person indefinitely. [Gabel, 1979] Thus, with a series of stacked, illuminated trays, one average sized room should be able to provide an average family with copious amounts of fresh food, indefinitely.

Information needs and communications may be met, to a good extent, by computerized hookup to the Internet. An advanced house will have many controllable elements that can be run by automated processes. The computer can monitor and adjust power generation; water intake, purification, and storage; heat, humidity, light levels; food production and the various elements of running nutrient cycles; house security, automatic doors, and so on.

A Few Words About Computers

Most people don't realize the power of the computers that sit on their desktops or get toted around in their notebooks. If they only use the machine for playing games, writing email, or keeping track of finances, they haven't begun to scratch the surface of what that little piece of silicon is capable of doing.

The fact of the matter is, when loaded with the proper software, just about any computer that has been manufactured since the early 1990's is capable of running an entire house. Any processor that is equivalent to a 386 or better, is capable of running a multiuser, multitasking, Unix-style operating system that will allow multiple people to use the machine at once, while it simultaneously monitors general house functioning. In some cases, this software is freely available over the Internet at no cost, other than that of learning how to run it. Interested readers are encouraged to check out the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy of USENET newsgroups, or to do a web search for the word "linux" to see a shining example of one such free operating system.

Telecommunications functionality is also a necessity in modern homes, and can likewise be met in many ways by the current computers on the market. Present day computers are now beginning to edge into the sphere of communications that was traditionally held by the telephone, television, and fax machine. In fact, there are programs available on the Internet at no cost which allow computers equipped with sound boards to act as full-fledged telephones. The computer on one end digitizes the speaker's voice, sends the data across the net on a 14.4K (or faster) modem, and the computer on the other end converts the signal back into audio form which comes out of the PC speakers. Real-time conversations can be held with only slight (1-2 second) delays, which will lessen as technology advances. There are also versions available which cryptographically scramble the voice data, to assure privacy even though the conversation traverses the public networks. Total cost to the users? The cost of their Internet connection, which is typically $20 per month. There are no long-distance charges.

In a similar vein, computer screens already deliver higher resolution than televisions, higher even than the much-promised but still undelivered "high definition television" (HDTV) that has been "just around the corner" for the past several years. With increasing network speeds and the high-powered graphics cards available today, TV can appear in a window of your computer screen, at full speed, with stereo sound. Using the small digital cameras available starting at around US$100 (Mid-1996), you may now do interactive video conferencing across the Internet. In essence, the power of the television studio is coming to the computer, and each home can be its own "station."

In the computer industry, there is something called "point-to-point protocol," or PPP. This is a networking protocol that allows any two points in communication with each other (i.e. - one phone calling another) to pass data as though they were hardwired into the Internet. This means that any phone, in any location, may make a phone call and be part of the Internet, just for the duration of that call. The practical upshot of this, in the context of the portable, self-sufficient house, is that any home, anywhere, may be connected to the Internet. Cellular and satellite technologies remove even the need for connecting wires, allowing families to live on remote mountain tops or tropical islands and still remain connected to friends, loved ones, current events, and educational resources.

In this way, we begin to see how some of the traditional social structures of schools and communities begin to dissolve and re-form into the in-home schooling and virtual cultures of the online world. In Maslow's hierarchy, having met the basics of physiological needs (level 1) and safety (level 2), people move on to dealing with the higher issues of belonging (level 3), self-esteem (level 4), and self-actualization (level 5). They begin to explore, to branch out, and to develop themselves more fully towards their true potential.

This is not meant to imply that the Internet is a panacea, and that simply by connecting to the resources online, one will become a more complete human being. In fact, there are strong arguments to the contrary. In his 1995 book, "Silicon Snake Oil," Clifford Stoll takes a very long, hard look at the almost fanatical rush to jump on the Internet bandwagon. This seeming mania has corporations spending millions of dollars trying to attract net-surfers to glitzy web sites that have lots of flash but little content, while libraries and schools are slashing their book and periodical budgets so that they can afford the latest New Thing to be offered on CD-ROM, and the latest machines to run those CD-ROMs. Readers are encouraged to pay special attention to this book. It indicates some new social problems that are heading our way quickly.

Please bear in mind that it was always intended to be "Technology in the Service of Mankind" and not the other way around. The computer is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. It should not be your master, and only by much labor and study may you begin to master it. The rewards are great, but the cost in time and focus may be more than many wish to invest. It is an inherently flexible tool, allowing one to perform in a wide variety of media. In today's society, such flexibility is useful, for as Abraham Maslow also said: "Those who are only good with hammers see every problem as a nail."

The computer is with us for the foreseeable future. It shouldn't appear as a fearsome thing, but as a useful extension of ourselves. By integrating the home computer with the home hydroponic garden, we should be able to develop gardens that are somewhat self-tending. This will lessen the amount of focus non-gardeners need to spend on the garden, and will thus help gardening appeal to a larger portion of today's push-button society.

The computer can keep track of things such as light levels, heat levels, humidity, nutrient flow and concentration, and amount of oxygen or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and nutrient solution. It can even take care of rotating plant trays or grow lights, provided the proper hardware is installed. All this can be done in the background, while the computer is also being used to maintain general house functioning, communications, etc., as noted above.

Some may think that this approach takes away the "fun" of gardening, and in some ways, this may be true. But for a good many people who are currently getting food from the local convenience mart, there may not be a tremendous interest in actual gardening. They'd like to put in the seeds, hit a button, and get food out of the other end. We must accommodate such viewpoints in future designs, so that people are able to reap the benefits of home-grown, readily available, non-processed food, without devoting copious amounts of their time to obtaining that food.

In "The Celestine Prophecy," James Redfield noted the feedback loop that can develop between a gardener and their plants, and how that loop is reinforced when one eats the vegetables that they, themself, have grown. As more people discover the joy of producing their own food, and tending to their own nutritional needs, we can expect to see a change in how people think, and in how society functions. As you build the bottom layers of Maslow's pyramid, the upper layers have a more solid foundation to leverage from.

The Freedom to Roam

Steven K. Roberts has spent the past eleven years promoting a lifestyle that he calls "technomadics" or "nomadness". It's a lifestyle using technology to free oneself from the infrastructure of society, which allows one to travel about the world, while maintaining contact with friends and family. Steve is widely known as "the guy on that computerized bicycle" by the many people who may have seen him on TV, or in newspaper and magazine articles with his recumbent bicycle, the BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy).

Steve rode approximately 17,000 miles on three different versions of his recumbent bicycle. Each one heavier, and more well-connected than the last. It was quite common for Steve to be getting email, faxes, cellular phone calls, ham radio calls, and information via satellite link-up...all while pedaling down the road on his bike. He used a digital camera to send pictures of where he was, kept track of his location via GPS (Global Positioning System), and kept a database of over 6000 friends and contacts from around the world. He has run a mailing list for several years promoting this lifestyle, and there is active discussion from many people roaming the planet in networked vans, hiking with backpacks and notebook computers, and other creative combinations.

For the past several years, Steve and his friends have been working on the Microship. It's a sea-based extension of the ideas developed on the BEHEMOTH, including all the latest tools to allow him and his partner to head out onto the oceans and explore the planet's coastlines and seaports, all while keeping in touch, of course. The Microship has more bells and whistles than I'd care to think about, including a hydroponic garden to supply fresh food while on the open sea, in case the day's catch proves sparse.

Steve's vision of the future entails a society of people who move about the planet in freely-forming and freely-separating communities of intention. People who come together, for a while, because of some common interest, and then go their separate ways at the time of their choosing. Much like the Internet, really. Whether they be packs of bicyclists riding cross-country, or his forthcoming "Flotilla" of small water craft, the idea remains the same: People find others with similar interest, join up with them for a while, travel and explore together, and then split off to join with other groups or explore on their own.