[Discuss] Open Source Ecological Housing

Wed Jun 29 20:26:37 UTC 2016

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 11:01 PM, Catarina Mota <catarina at openmaterials.org>
wrote:

> Andrew: wow, I love your project! And now I really, really want a floating
> hackerspace! We're super sleep-deprived at the moment, but perhaps we could
> chat off-list next week about some possible avenues for collaboration?
>

I get nerd sniped by buildings that aren't linked to real estate too. The
last time (as in last week) I ended up trying to design a modular,
submersible living space that could be linked together to form islands and
towers in the ocean. I figured you could build multiple levels high by just
sinking the lower levels. Anyway, yeah, it would really showcase the
modularity of the designs if they could churn out house boats too.

>
> Emilio: nice, I look forward to hearing more about it.
>
> Matt: thank so much for your detailed feedback - it's really useful. I'll
> go through it in the detail to see what changes we could implement at this
> point. In the mean time, a couple clarifications:
>
> - The order of the text was suggested by the kickstarter reviewer team. We
> assumed they know more about this than we do - but perhaps what is usually
> right is not necessarily right for us... I'll investigate further.
>

Sure, and I don't pretend to be all that good at marketing copy, I've just
been studying it lately because I realized I wasn't any good at all. I
think I am pretty good at recognizing when a builder is having a hard time
switching to marketing because I have a lot of subjective experience with
that.

>
> - The cost issue is a bit more complicated. You're absolutely right in
> what you said. The bigger issue is that there is a lack of "starter homes"
> in the market at the moment. The choices seem to be between the McMansion
> and the Tiny Home - either get in serious debt or go with a small home.
> Personally, I'm in-between those two options: I don't have $360k, but I
> also don't want to live in a tiny home forever (I lived in mini
> houses/apartments for 15 years). I want something small and affordable to
> start with - but that can be expanded. Most tiny homes are not designed for
> that.
>

That get-in-then-build-out approach is something I'm extremely interested
in. It's counter intuitive to most people. Typically, the options are to
buy what everyone else is buying or do it totally on your own. If you pick
the former, then you need to get financing, and banks only finance large
mortgages. If you do it yourself, you're probably limited to a microhouse.
I think there's a strong case to be made for the intermediate approach
where, because of modular and open source standards, you can spend what
would have been your down payment building a small house, and then spend
what would have been your yearly mortgage payments expanding it. Or not.
That isn't an option with traditional building techniques and communities,
but it very well might be with the new stuff. You could tie it in to
current events. There's probably something in the pitch that millenials and
retirees need a house that's as cheap as a car.

I wonder if you can deconstruct modular houses with the same transaction
costs as constructing them. How much can you recover? Do you get the
original components back if you start pulling out nails and screws?

>
> A couple interesting links about this:
>
> http://www.businessinsider.com/housing-supply-crisis-is-looming-2016-3
>
>
> https://www.ted.com/talks/alejandro_aravena_my_architectural_philosophy_bring_the_community_into_the_process?language=en
>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Emilio Velis <contacto at emiliovelis.com>
> wrote:
>
>> So I have this project I'm interested in making happen here in El
>> Salvador and am getting a lot of people involved to fund it and make it
>> happen. Very much worth it.
>>
>> I'll stay on the loop and keep you posted soon! Thanks for sharing!
>>
>> On 29 June 2016 at 13:42, Matt Maier <blueback09 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here are thoughts as they occur to me:
>>>
>>> I feel like you should lead with this stuff.
>>> http://openbuildinginstitute.org/buildings/
>>> It's easy to get excited about the technical details you had to get
>>> working to make the project functional, but customers aren't going to care
>>> until they want to live there. So tell them stories about how nice it is to
>>> live there.
>>>
>>> I'm interested in the infrastructure necessary to get a serious open
>>> source hardware project working, but not many other people are. There are a
>>> lot more people interested in cheap, efficient microhouses, and a whole lot
>>> more people interested in green tech, and even more interested in small
>>> living spaces.
>>>
>>> Don't use a screenshot of the kickstarter video with "play" on it as a
>>> link to kickstarter. If it looks like a button to start a video it should
>>> start an embedded video.
>>>
>>> To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the kickstarter campaign is
>>> funding. You already build the house, and you don't seem to be trying to
>>> build a bunch more houses, like for a community in Africa or something. I
>>> feel like maybe "you're funding a source of all the knowledge and skills
>>> you need to design and build a house yourself" is the primary value
>>> proposition, but it's kind of buried. Oh, okay, there it is. The list of
>>> what the campaign is funding is a quick set of bullet points at the end of
>>> the video. It's also buried in the about/roadmap and contribute/support us
>>> on kickstarter sections of the website. I'm pretty sure I saw it somewhere
>>> on the kickstarter page too. It seems like it should be a lot easier to
>>> find out exactly what is being funded.
>>>
>>> Do you think the open source documentation will be detailed enough for
>>> someone to build everything without paying to learn how? The implication
>>> from the description is that people are expected to offset the cost of the
>>> build by charging people for the knowledge they acquire during the build.
>>> I'd be interested in following how general contractors and builders
>>> incorporate this as an option in their business.
>>>
>>> Also, in general, it feels like you could summarize and cut the text
>>> down by at least 50%. The diagrams take up a lot of space but don't
>>> necessarily illuminate much. The "we offer/you can" diagram takes a couple
>>> minutes to understand (the fonts aren't helping).
>>>
>>> The video's already shot, but as I parse out what's being funded it
>>> struck me that you might not want to characterize your location as "in the
>>> middle of nowhere" when a big part of the plan is to build a facility
>>> people are supposed to travel to and use. Maybe something like "the perfect
>>> place to live efficiently" or "the opposite of NYC" would be better
>>> marketing. Along similar lines, it seems unnecessarily misleading to
>>> compare the cost of your microhouse to an average $360K house. It took
>>> about 30 seconds of googling to find that the costs you're estimating are
>>> right in line with microhouses
>>> https://padtinyhouses.com/how-much-does-a-tiny-house-cost/ and I doubt
>>> you're poaching anyone who was planning to build a brand new 2000 square
>>> foot McMansion to switch to building a microhouse. Even if you do get some
>>> of them, they'll compare yours to other microhouses. Oh man, and you buried
>>> something towards the end to the effect that you're crowdfunding part of
>>> the costs and bootstrapping the rest; that should be near the top!
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 8:53 PM, Catarina Mota <catarinamfmota at gmail.com
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear fellow open sourcerers,
>>>>
>>>> We just launched a new project that has been many years in the making.
>>>> It's called the Open Building Institute and it's an open source initiative
>>>> to make affordable eco-housing accessible to everyone. The project is
>>>> based on collaborative rapid-builds, a modular system, and open source
>>>> machines.
>>>>
>>>> Check it out: http://openbuildinginstitute.org
>>>>
>>>> Any feedback and collaborations will be greatly appreciated.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Catarina
>>>>
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