Nomadz Nu

Nomadz.nu was a nuPhilosophical Futures Experiment with the purpose to explore the boundaries of Digital Nomadism. Over a decade ago, in 2010, Ine Dehandschutter and myself traveled and lived on 3 different continents (Cape Town, Thailand, Buenos Aires) for 1 year all the while working as freelancers for clients in Belgium. 

We're talking about a time when freelancing was on the rise and coworking had just started taking off but was not really much visible yet. 

We were most certainly longing for adventures, but also curious about what possibilities might lay hidden just beneath the surface of a 9to5 working class reality. So we decided to go and explore the question: “Would it possible to pick up our life and take it with us to the other side of the world? And basically everywhere we want, living location independently, while we kept on working, doing the same job as we would have done at home, for the same clients but remotely.”

Think modern nomads, digital ones. Taking your lives with you. Laptops. Skype. Clients. Projects. Facebook. Friends. For one year we lived in 3 different locations all the while working both for clients and on our own projects from behind our laptops, coming back with as much money as when we left, making it a sustainable way of living. At the same time we started experimenting with antifragile income projects and, even more importantly, projects that would make their and our world and life a better place. In the meantime we went wildlife watching, participated at Burning Man, visited Patagonia, enjoyed the most incredible Thai massages & food and learned how to surf.

We were blessed to have been sponsored by Telenet, Sony & Eurostar and to enjoy (inter)national media attention (internet, tv, radio & print).

We have given presentations on the subject at Brussels Girl Geek Dinner, Thomas Cook, Barcamp, TEDxFlanders, Creativity World Forum. Also proud to say that one of these presentations was picked up by Slideshare and make it to 'top presentation of the day' generating more than 200K views, 5K social media shares. We were mentioned in blogposts from Japan to Russia, the US and Brazil. 

Zu Hause

How does a home of a modern nomad look like? A place where one can come and go: a personal pied-à-terre, a place to call your own, a safe place where you can always return to... while at the same time building in the flexibility for home sharing, renting and other p2p models to optimize freedom of travel global living.

With almost half of the marriages failing in the course of a lifetime, should we continue to build nuclear family homes or step away from the traditional one family home model inherited from our grandparents and design new, better adapted ways of buying, living and designing homes?

With modern institutions surrounding us in the middle of a system crisis, in what way is the traditional model of the state as provider of social security a viable one? While hierarchic institutions still make up for many of today's systems, there's a very clear tendency toward human as a free agent. While with the rise of the freelance economy we are gaining freedom, we also live in a society marked by a lot more complexity and uncertainty. The ideal life of Millennials is built upon adventures and undertaking hero's  journeys. But, in reality, it is one characterized by high unemployment rates and insecure retirement funding as well. How can we use property investment to build an antifragile life ?  

Following a personal passion for architecture and design Zu Hause is a project in which all the above questions where to be explored. While originally planning this to be a 1 year project, it ultimately became a 4 year journey (2014-2018) during which my life’s landscape changed quite a lot.

This culminated in less of a focus on the p2p and nomadic home elements (although it might do so again in the future), and more on the building of a antifragile life, a definition of home in a very different way.

That being said: the learnings, experiences and continued influence of Zu Hause on my life and perspective aren’t of less significance. The project’s capacity to be flexible enough to move along life’s changes showed characteristic of it being a journey of exploration into an antifragile life.