The House You Download To Your Desktop

The housing market is in shambles. Thanks to years of unsavory lending practices, home foreclosures are at record highs across the country, and what was once a safe, reliable investment -- or at least something to "flip" for a quick profit -- has become an outright liability.But from the ashes of this current housing meltdown, a new model for building and designing homes is poised to emerge, one fueled not only by technological innovation and a desire to reduce our footprint on the planet, but ultimately a complete re-imagining of what the home can and should be.

BERLIN — The fate of Adolf Hitler’s birthplace in the picturesque Austrian border town of Braunau has been fiercely debated at least since victorious American G.I.s stopped the Nazis from destroying the house at the end of World War II. Now Austria plans to end the dispute, drafting a law that would enable the government to seize the property and decide on its final use.

I’ve spent the last 20 years developing software, managing software development, and doing software systems analysis full-time. I’ve been programming since I was 16. The first time I went to college, my major was computer science.  Since then, I’ve seen one major revolution in the computer industry, which essentially blew up everything that came before it.

Late last year, Google announced plans to make some of its most popular products more kid-friendly. The company said it wants to revamp entities like YouTube and Chrome to be more "fun and safe for children" over the course of 2015.

Getty Images/Agung ParameswaraOrthopedic surgeons are relying more and more on 3-D printing to build replacements for their patients’ defective or worn out bones. This year surgeons around the world will implant tens of thousands of 3-D printed replacements parts for hips, knees, ankles, parts of the spine, and even sections of the skull. 

AMSTERDAM — Hundreds of years after wealthy merchants began building the tall, narrow brick houses that have come to define Amsterdam’s skyline, Dutch architects are updating the process for the 21st century: fabricating pieces of a canal house out of plastic with a giant 3-D printer and slotting them together like oversized Lego blocks. Hedwig Heinsm

It’s possible. Even a guy in the tiny, impoverished African country of Togo has done it. For someone living in a low-tech society like 33-year old Kodjo Afate Gnikou, spending $800 for a desktop printer is a little steep. So Afate constructed his own working printer from junk, mostly spare computer, scanner and inkjet printer parts he found in a local dump. It’s believed to be the world’s first 3-D printer made from e-waste.