[Discuss] Open Source Ecological Housing

Andrew Quitmeyer andy at comingle.io
Wed Jun 29 21:22:58 UTC 2016


Not to derail too much on floating buildings, but also this project is
AMAZING: http://www.svseeker.com/wp/?v=7516fd43adaa

Doug Jackson is building a huge 75 foot steel boat for living on and
letting scientists do research on, and he documents the whole thing (and he
builds it in Tulsa!)


__

Sincerely,

Andrew Quitmeyer - PhD
Founder / Designer / Documentarian
www.comingle.io

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 4:43 PM, Catarina Mota <catarina at openmaterials.org>
wrote:

>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I agree with what you said. My instinct was also to put the buildings and
> campaign scope (what it's funding) at the top, but kickstarter told us to
> move it down... Anyway, I'm just a nerd and don't know the first thing
> about marketing :D
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Yes, that is it exactly! This project was born out of our need for a
> "get-in-then-build-out" house - which no one else seemed to be able to
> provide. So, we were just "scratching our own itch" (as Raymond puts it)
> and then realized this make make sense for others as well.
>
>
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
> We're always changing things around here and did quite a bit of
> deconstruction. The take from that is that you can use pretty much all the
> lumber - even entire modules, without taking them apart - and about 75% of
> the fasteners. But taking things apart and then putting them back together
> is a lot of work. And you can't salvage the foundation, or the compressed
> earth block walls, or any buried pipes (well, you could, but it would suck
> to dig them up). So it's doable - if you need to - but not something I'd
> like to do every year :)
>
>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> discuss mailing list
>>>>>> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
>>>>>> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> discuss mailing list
>>>>> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
>>>>> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> discuss mailing list
>>>> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
>>>> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> discuss mailing list
>>> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
>>> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> discuss mailing list
>> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
>> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20160629/20db04f9/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the discuss mailing list