The truth at any cost lowers all other costs
“Engineered wood is the material of the future for urban building. The Open Source Wood Initiative is a great way to promote sustainable building,” says Philippe Blanchard, lecturer from Ecole Superieure du Bois.
Short descriptions of all three concepts can be found from opensourcewood.com/hackathon.
Visit: http://opensourceecology.org/
10% of cost or better, Open Source is…
Children Synthesize Two Dollar Version of Martin Shkreli’s $750 Malaria Drug
The aim was to enable anyone in the community (from professors and pharmaceutical professionals, to undergraduates and school classes) to help solve our most pressing health concerns. […]
Anyone could take part, all the data and ideas had to be public domain, and there were to be no patents. Our lab notebooks were no longer sitting on the bench of a locked lab, but were updated in real time on the internet.
Constructing houses out of mud with a 3D printer … this looks like a great advance for getting building costs down to what can be afforded locally just about anywhere!
The world’s largest Delta 3D printer creates nearly zero-cost homes out of mud
The future of affordable (and sustainable) housing may lie with 3D printing. The World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) has unveiled the world’s largest delta-style 3D printer, which can build full-size buildings out of mud and clay for nearly zero cost. The massive BigDelta printer stands 12 meters tall (40 feet), and it’s nearly completed its first house at a cost of just 48 euros so far. Read more, watch video, see compelling photographs.
Open-Source Toolkit Aims to Make Home Building Cheap, Easy and Green
As open source advocates and newlyweds, Marcin Jakubowski and Catarina Mota decided to reinvent the home-building wheel a few years back. In the process, they have been developing an entirely open-source toolkit that makes the design and construction of eco-friendly, off-grid modular housing easier, cheaper, and faster through use of modular designs, rapid-build construction, social production, locally-sourced materials, and open-source machines.
Image of $25K Open Source Starter Home Below the Fold
Welcome to Open Source Medical Imaging. A prototype machine will be $10k in materials instead of $1M off the shelf, and first images are expected next year. Lukas has received a Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant for this work, and just presented this at the world’s largest MR conference.
Hacking the farm with low-cost, open source tool designs
Don Watkins, opensource.com, 15 February 2016
Phi Beta Iota: MUST READ. Kudos to Don Watkins for the questions and opensource.com for paying attention outside the IT arena. This is a very positive development.
Forget the ‘sharing economy’: technology is about to usher in the ‘circular’ economy
A ‘circular supply chain’ using technology can achieve sustainable production and business growth
An open, networked business-to-business platform that connects entire supply chains can serve as the enabler for progressive enterprises with the foresight to seize the opportunity.
Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Forget Sharing — Go Circular Economy”
8 ways to rethink resources: nappies to benches and food waste to biogas
LIST ONLY
1. Nappies to roof tiles and railway sleepers . 2. Paper to reduce food waste . 3. Sustainable construction materials . 4. Clothes from old water bottles . 5. Agri-waste into plastic bottles . 6. Worms as fertiliser . 7. Food waste to biogas . 8. Recycling polyester
Phi Beta Iota: Brilliant examples of remediation in context of continuing to do the wrong things righter (Russell Ackoff 2004). Bio-design and the tri-fecta of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering would make such measures moot.
Can local manufacturing compete with automobile mass production? It seems that yes, it can. The technology will improve as time goes on and you can’t beat the price…
3-D Printed Car: NY Daily News Autos gets a ride in the Local Motors “Strati” 3-D printed roadster
The world’s first 3-D printed car is now a reality, and the Daily News Autos got to ride in the car of the future on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. Engineered and built by Phoenix-based Local Motors, the 2-passenger roadster, called the “Strati,” can be printed in 44 hours and has a top speed of approximately 50 mph.
EXTRACT
“This is about simplification and streamlining,” explains Jay Rogers, co-founder and CEO of Local Motors. Rogers was present to give us a tour of the Strati and explain, exactly, 3-D printing tech brings to the automotive world. “All this material you’re looking at,” he says, pointing to the car, “is about $3,500 dollars.”
. . . . . . .
Granted, it’s not pretty, but the prototypes ridged edges can be smoothed over with human-powered grinding and sanding. Paint can also be applied to the body-work, though this negates the Strati’s near 100-percent recyclability.
4/4 Fabbing & cities: Barcelona Fab City
This post is the fourth of 4 posts about Digital manufacturing (fabbing) environments that we have been publishing weekly on Fridays. In these posts I have shared my research on fab labs, open innovation and smart cities, mainly in Europe and in Spain.
The fourth post is the result of a research on fab labs and their relationship with smartcities. In the last two articles I have written about two recent nodes of the global fab lab network. Although there are other fablabs in Spain, I decided to give visibility to these two initiatives in León and in Sevilla. Among all fab labs in Spain those two are giving a real opportunity to make personal production and digital manufacturing accessible and comprehensible for a wide range of people. However, the most popular manufacturing laboratory in Spain is Fab Lab Barcelona (2008). It is settled in the IAAC – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and it is part of the Fab Lab Network. I would like to share my interest in their research on how the digital production ecosystem could make our cities smarter.
Beautiful Woven Refugee Tents Get Their Power from the Sun
Designer Abeer Seikaly has developed a practical yet elegant solution to the need for lightweight, mobile, and structurally sound shelters for disaster zones.
The Canadian-Jordanian’s Weaving a Home project not only provides flexible, transportable shelter, but also incorporates water collection, solar power generation and solar water heating into the design.
Each tent has its own water collection system, utilizing the natural channels formed by the skin to direct water to the storage point. By using a fabric with strong thermal properties, the tents can alsoconvert solar radiation into power and heat collected water for showering.
3D printing is growing up!
How a Dutch team of architects is 3D-printing a full-sized house in Amsterdam (video 4 min)
Architects in Amsterdam have started building what they say is one of the world’s first full-sized 3D-printed houses. The structure is being built using a plastic heavily based on plant oil. The team behind the house claim it is a waste-free, eco-friendly way to design and construct the cities of the future.
The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Abstract. This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the ‘prototype’ as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory.
Keywords: open source urbanism, infrastructures, urban ecologies, urban commons, right to the city, prototypes
Corsín Jiménez A, 2014, “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2) 342 – 362
PDF (21 Pages): 2014 Open Source Urbanism Right to Infrastructure
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
– Samuel Beckett
Paracity is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-build actions generating spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built human environment and this organic constructivist dialog leading into self-organized community structures, development and knowledge building.
The growing organism the Paracity is based on a three dimensional wooden primary structure, organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6 metres (6 meters is approximately 18 feet)constructed out of CLT cross-laminated timber sticks. This simple structure can be modified and grown by the community members working as teams or by an assigned Paracity constructor.
Paracity’s self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid environmental technology solutions providing methods for water purification, energy production, organic waste treatment, waste water purification and sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be adjusted according to the growth of the Paracity and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leaching waste from its host city becoming a positive urban parasite following the similar kind of symbiosis as in-between slums and the surrounding city. In a sense Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction.
Learn more — superb range of photographs and graphics.
