'Rightsize': a housing design game for spatial and energy sufficiency

A chronic misallocation of housing space in the UK creates sufficiency problems because some people do not have enough space, whilst others use excess energy to heat and cool unoccupied rooms. Energy is also used to build new homes that compensate for redundancy in the existing stock. A sufficiency-oriented approach is introduced for new housing that encourages people in multi-apartment housing to respond to changing housing needs by merging an apartment they might own with adjacent modules of living space they could rent. Rental costs encourage the shedding of underused space, making spatial sufficiency more likely. Converting this theoretical basis into a conceptual framework, the aim is not only to explain sufficiency-oriented housing to new audiences. Rather it is to propose a design game through which to establish a functional unit for describing spatial and energy sufficiency. A beta version of the game—as a 'metagame' or context-adaptable blueprint—suggests this method has the potential to reveal strategic behaviours, produce a shared understanding of sufficiency, help to overcome institutional barriers to sufficiency-focused new-build housing, and produce qualitative (and potentially quantitative) data for analysis. Further development by the gaming community could make this accessible to diverse stakeholders.