[Discuss] Open Source Ecological Housing

Wed Jun 29 21:41:12 UTC 2016

Matt - We're searching for the killer angle - as there are so many of them
in the Open Building Institute.

These things stand out:

   - The 'intermediate' house option between 2 extremes
   - House for the price of a car
   - Spend that which you would pay for mortgage - expanding your small home
   - millenials and baby boomer audience
   - Incremental housing get-in-then-build-out

PS. The campaing IS funding a ----load of new builds: 2 this year, 6 next
year - to get the Starter Home perfected and tested.

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 3:26 PM, Matt Maier <blueback09 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
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