What We’re Building: The Future of Spacelo

Spacelo has started with articles, practical ideas and a growing set of tools, but there's much more we'd like to build around it. The longer-term aim is for Spacelo to become a platform where people from different backgrounds, different ways of living and different parts of the world can come for ideas and inspiration to make their living spaces work better for them. That could mean discovering how someone has made a small apartment work in a busy city, finding growing ideas suited to a completely different climate, exploring how other cultures use their homes or simply coming across a solution you hadn't considered before. Not every idea will work for every home — and it doesn't need to. Part of what we want Spacelo to become is a place where you can discover different approaches, take what works for you and adapt it to your own space. And as more people use Spacelo, we'd like the people using it to help influence where it goes next.

Articles will always be an important part of Spacelo, but we want the site to be somewhere you can do things as well as read about them. The Plant Finder, Room Layout Planner and Energy Saver are the beginning of that. Over time, we'd like to build more practical tools that help with the subjects we explore across GrowHaus, Space Lab and Smart Living. Some might help answer a question. Others could help you plan something, compare different options or make a decision about your home. We don't want to build tools simply because we can. They should have a useful reason to exist. And as the Spacelo community grows, what people use, ask for and tell us they're struggling with can help shape what we build next.

We also don't expect to build everything alone. There's a huge amount of knowledge across growing, design, technology, sustainability, home improvement and the many other subjects that affect how we live. Building relationships with people and organisations who genuinely know those areas can help us explore them properly. That could mean working with specialists, creators, businesses, researchers or brands. It could involve testing something new, sharing expert knowledge, exploring an interesting project or creating something together. The important part is that the partnership adds something useful to Spacelo rather than existing simply for the sake of having a partnership.

Further ahead, we'd also like to explore ways for Spacelo to exist outside the website. That could include workshops, demonstrations, talks or small events where people can learn something practical, try an idea for themselves or meet others interested in making their homes work better. A workshop could be about growing something in a small space. Another might look at organising an awkward room, setting up useful smart-home technology or understanding energy use around the home. Exactly what those might look like is something we'll explore over time. But there's something appealing about taking an idea that started on a screen and giving people the chance to actually try it.

We have plenty of ideas for where Spacelo could go. Not all of them need to happen at once, and some will undoubtedly change as we learn what people actually find useful. What matters more is the direction. We want Spacelo to grow into a platform where people can discover ideas, learn something useful, use practical tools and find inspiration from different ways of living around the world. And eventually, we'd like some of those people to contribute ideas of their own. There's a lot still to build. That's what makes the future of Spacelo interesting.