The IDEO Chicago team elected to explore climate change through the constraints of a typical American city. Conceptually, they felt that if a city were a place to escape to (or from), or a place within which one could live without limits, then it would not be a workable city. So they decided to portray a city with limits, as a contained space, by way of a "single house" (as illustrated by the Foam core prototypes in the piece).