Skip to minute 5 for the section on yourHOUSE.
Larry Sass: This design of yourHOUSE is a reinterpretation of historical New Orleans style “Shotgun” Housing utilizing recycled plywood as the main structural material. The house will be fabricated and assembled entirely of friction-fit components, completely eliminating the need for mechanical fasteners such as nails and screws. This fabrication technique is made possible through the extensive use of computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines…
Sass’s house at MOMA was subject of much scrutiny– after all, minimising joints to increase robustness has been a builders rule of thumb for many centuries. However, yourHOUSE should not be viewed as a house through the eyes of a realtor, but as a demonstration of the possibility to not only make almost anything with personal fabrication machines, but also to make those things personally customisable. Sass and his team paid great attention to the architectural origins of the location site they were designing for, in this case, post-Katrina New Orleans. This is a general benefit of providing machines for fabrication instead of pre-fabbed products. The users can make things the way they want, the way they see they need things.
Jeff Warren and Alice B. Philips: The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. Providing shelter to a family of four, it folds up into 1/4 of a shipping container for efficient deployment.
Harnessing economies of scale is theoretically by far the cheapest way to help as many people as possible. Architecture schools are riddled with proposals of flat-packing houses that fit into shipping containers– cheap, fast and easy. However, these rarely ask whether or not they will be used. After all, it is a free house for those who don’t have houses, so they (where the disaster has struck) obviously want this…right? The rejection of FEMA trailers would probably be viewed as similarly surprising.
In the end, no one can know what it is that Haitians will use but the Haitians themselves. We hope we can help by supporting Haitians in rebuilding.
The Students of Color Committee (SCC) of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT:
We are hosting a screening of The Road to Fondwa, a documentary about positive self-help development movements in Haiti, followed by a question/comment segment with one of the film’s directors, brief presentations of faculty initiatives in Haiti, and ending with a a dialogue for participants to ask questions and speak of their work and experiences in Haiti. Dinner will be served (Haitian cuisine of course!)
Amidst the chaos, people of Haiti cannot avoid rebuilding. Here a Port-au-Prince resident has started an internet cafe using Fablab’s favourite router, the Linksys.
From boston.comGay Maclaire (right) sets up a wireless modem at his new internet cafe at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti January 30, 2010. After the earthquake destroyed Maclaire’s internet business, he recovered some of the equipment and started an internet cafe at a makeshift camp in front of the damage presidential palace, where he lives with his family. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
One of the Fablab Afghanistan’s favourite projects is FabFi: directional antenna + wireless router. In Afghanistan, FabLab users are progressively expanding a wireless mesh broadband network to communicate with each other and extend internet connectivity from a few isolated uplinks to a user community that spans more than 50 square kilometers.
Afghanis work on a small directional antenna for sharing wifi. Photo by Keith Berkoben.
Wireless hops can be chained together, with larger antennas making big hops and smaller ones sharing locally. Here in Afghanistan, a large antenna can hop up to 5 miles. Photo by Keith Berkoben.
Even though Fabfi is working well in Afghanistan, it does not mean it is the best thing for Haiti. Developing technology that is appropriate for the surroundings is key, and perhaps there are materials more easily available in Haiti that people can make wireless antennas with.
Here, instead of using the original design for the FabFi antenna, Afghanis reused a USAID vegetable oil can to make a directional antenna. Their upcycled version is only a few dB off from the original. Photo by Hameed Tsal.
Chaired by Prof. Jacqueline Bhabha and
introduced by Dr. Gregg Greenough
Discussants:
“Immediate Health and Public Health Needs of the Haitian Population–the View from a Field Hospital”
Stephanie Rosborough, MD, MPH
Affiliate Faculty,
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School
“The Vulnerable Population — Findings of the FXB-HHI Child Protection Assessment”
Brett Nelson, MD, MPH
Affiliate Faculty, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Co-Director, Program on Children in Conflict and Crisis
“The Evolution of Crowd-sourced Data and Open Platforms for Response”
Patrick Meier, PhD (candidate)
Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Director, Program on Crisis Mapping
Wednesday 10 February at 4:00pm, at
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Harvard Kennedy School
79 JFK Street
Rubenstein Building
2nd floor – Room 219
Dale Joachim and Barry Vercoe are teaching a class on New Media Projects for Haiti as an extension of their IAP class on new media projects for Haiti.
A project-based class to develop new technologies and educational tools that will contribute to progressive social changes in Haiti. We will explore viable contexts for promoting self-expression, communication, literacy and numeracy, and digital governance, given current challenges and strengths within the society. Topics will include sensors, language, music, computational methods for teaching and learning, civic engagement and social media.
Participants will choose a societal problem and devise a solution, with the goal of spending the last week of April in Haiti field testing and documenting their solution.
Guest lecturers will include Joe Paradiso, Michel DeGraff, Henry Lieberman, Judith Donath, Claudia Urrea, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Charles Kane.
Haiti after the earthquake, a FORUM event, Feb 1st, 2010. From left to right: Mary Jo Bane, Prof. Ricardo Hausmann, the Hon. Marie St. Fleur, Dr. Allen S. Counter, the Hon. Linda Dorcena Forry. photo by Nadya Peek.
A forum at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government invited prominent Harvard faculty and Massachusetts State representatives involved with Haiti, aid and reform to discuss Haiti after the earthquake. A brief summary:
Dr. Allen S. Counter is the director of the Harvard Foundation, works as a neurophysiologist at Mass General Hospital and has travelled to Haiti twice since the earthquake. With a team of Harvard Medical School faculty, he brought basic medical supplies to Haiti to try to help in any way he can. He represents the amazing help Haiti is getting right now- help with figuring out how to deal with the disaster.
State representatives Marie St. Fleur and Linda Dorcena Forry are Haitian-Americans in the Massachusetts House. They are less involved with the immediate aid, but question how Haiti, a troubled country to start with, is going to be able to rebuild itself now that its infrastructure has been destroyed. Marie St. Fleur hopes that 200 thousand Haitians will not have died in vain, but that we can use this momentum to fundamentally rebuild Haiti. The Haitian government itself needs to function to be able to create a sustainable future for Haiti, and they need to start reform now. How this is going to be done in the short term is still a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Finally, Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard’s Center of International Development, started wondering about the economic future for Haiti, and where jobs can come from in the short term. He stressed that Haiti was only part of the island of Hispaniola, and that the more well-faring Dominican Republic was going to have to be studied closer to figure out how to deal with Haiti. He pointed to short term opportunities in garment manufacturing– perhaps how to kickstart the Haitian economy. The idea of sweatshop jobs saving Haiti was not met with a particularly enthusiastic response.
Feb 1st, 2010, 6:00pm FORUM event: Haiti After the Earthquake
A conversation with: Dr. S. Allen Counter, Director, The Harvard Foundation; The Hon. Linda Dorcena Forry, Member, Massachusetts House of Representatives; Prof. Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Center for International Development at Harvard University; The Hon. Marie St. Fleur, Member, Massachusetts House of Representatives. Moderated by Mary Jo Bane, Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management and Academic Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
cardboard mockup for Nadya’s rowboat in fabclass, 2009
In Port-au-Prince in the past few months, thousands of people have lost their homes, and with that all of their belongings. Many have been sleeping in the street– houses which are not completely destroyed are often too unstable to reenter. In the near future, Haiti will rapidly rebuild itself.
A fablab, or fabrication laboratory, is a workshop of computer controlled machines with which one can make almost anything: furniture, electronics, even houses. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, people need to be able to make the things they want and need to resume their lives.
We are raising money to be able to buy, install and run a FabLab in Port-au-Prince.
A fablab, or fabrication laboratory, is a workshop of computer controlled machines with which one can make almost anything: furniture, electronics, even houses. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, people need to be able to make the things they want and need to resume their lives.
