Can lifestyle-based scenarios provide insight into the nature of energy use in our future buildings? Participants in a design charrette brainstormed ideas about the future of US homes and workplaces. The teams started from several descriptions of daily lifestyles, and developed specific building characteristics as the place settings for these narratives. In addition to the characterization of the physical environment, we also speculate as to the forces that would be influential in making these

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... hanges. Further reflection was made on the possible unintended consequences of these changes. The rationale for this exercise was to broaden the discussion on future energy use by looking at future scenarios in the context of everyday life. Background Forecasts of energy use make assumptions about the way we live and work and how this will change over time. As an exercise we asked the question: What might our homes and workplaces be like in the year 2020 and what forces will bring about these changes? The effort was not to set a utopian vision for our future buildings, but to look at what might be reasonable changes to expect for our homes and workplaces in the near future. Several authors in the past 20 years have looked at lifestyle-based energy scenario forecasting. Paul Hawken and his colleagues in the early 1980s looked at how access to energy and resources led to different lifestyle scenarios (Hawken, Ogilvy, & Schwartz 1982) . Lee Schipper and colleagues reviewed demographic trends and other lifestyle factors in developing different energy scenarios for the US and elsewhere (Schipper & Meyers 1993) . More recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified four scenarios based on different economic and population growth worldwide to look at energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (Carter et al. 2000) . By developing lifestyle-based scenarios, we could then ask questions about the energy implications of these changes, and how might we create energy policies to take these changes into account. The assumption here is that energy is an integral factor of how we 1 Contact information: 1 Cyclotron Road, Building 90 room 3074, Berkeley, CA 94720. RCDiamond@lbl.gov LBL-50184 2 live, work and play, and to understand future changes in energy demand we need to understand the dynamic nature of how our changing lifestyles interact with the built environment.