The thinking persons house
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
A thinking person’s house is not defined by its gadgets. It is designed around how people actually live — their rhythms, needs, relationships, and changing priorities over time. Smart home technology is a tool. The thinking person’s house is an outcome: a space that responds to human needs intelligently rather than adding complexity in the name of connectivity or convenience.
Start with how life actually works now, then project how it will shift. Who lives in this space, and how might that change over a decade? What kinds of work, learning, and care happen here? A thinking person’s house builds in flexibility — rooms that serve multiple purposes, infrastructure that upgrades, and layouts that accommodate ageing, remote work, and multi-generational living without requiring full renovation.
Most homes are built to a template that reflects life as it was, not life as it is. The open-plan family home made sense for a particular era of household structure. That era has shifted. People are working from home, caring for elderly parents, running side businesses, and seeking acoustic privacy within shared spaces. The template has not caught up — and neither have most builders or planners.
The period from 2020 onward shifted the home from background to foreground. It became the place where everything happened at once. That changed what people value: natural light, acoustic separation, garden access, flexible space, and neighbourhood walkability all rose sharply in priority. This is not nostalgia — it is a recalibration of what home must do when it has to serve so many more purposes simultaneously.
They will need to support multiple people working simultaneously without interrupting each other. They will need to accommodate ageing in place — wider corridors, adaptable bathrooms, accessible layouts. They will need energy and water resilience as climate pressures intensify. And they will need to be emotionally restorative, because the pace of change outside the home is not slowing and the home is increasingly where people recover from it.
