We just built a Hexayurt H13 at the Cloughjordan Ecovillage. The H13 was designed by Scott Davis and Dylan Toymaker. The H13 adds one panel to the “classic” H12 hexayurt, but that one extra sheet of plywood gets an 8′ roof line and three times the walkable space inside the hexayurt.

It’s a really beautiful piece of lateral thinking, and I think it’s destined to become the standard hexayurt for any application which doesn’t require the very low wind profile of the H12 or absolute materials efficiency. I’m very grateful to Scott and Dylan for dedicating their work to the public domain just like the original hexayurt on which they innovated. This is how the commons learn and grow: we all work together to improve the state of the art until our new techniques are good enough to change the world.

This particular hexayurt was built by a green building training course run by Greenworks, an Irish vocational training company. Ben Whelan of Cultivate, Bruce Darrell of Cloughjordan Community Farm and Ben Hutchison of INOX.ie (a stainless steel parts firm that has offices on site) helped with the build. We cut the parts with a table saw at BenH’s house, then took them up to the farm site and built the hexayurt (destined to be a tool shed) in about 3 hours with a team of about ten people. I was surprised how fast it came together, we’re getting better with each build, and the combination of multiple screw guns and parallel work on different parts of the building works very well. It’s all about multiple small teams working in parallel. I’m looking forwards to assembly-line style construction in the future, where we just crank these things out in stations with jigs. I think you could do about one person-day of effort per yurt that way, possibly less. Large teams could produce enough units for an entire refugee camp in only a few months, and the work is simple enough that even people with no construction experience can meaningfully contribute to the construction process, and those with some building skills are soon fully up to speed. It’s good, simple, direct work.

This hexayurt is made of OSB 3. We don’t have the floor finished yet – there’s talk of rammed earth or possibly some kind of gravel and carpeting solution (!) but as I say, “the wind and the rain are the same everywhere, but the ground is unique to each place you go.” I think that the H13 design is a truly visionary piece of architecture in that it combines the structural rigidity of the monocoque like the hexayurt, but the spatial utility of the roof ridge which efficiently generates walking-height interior floor space, all without creating a need for additional components.

Good work, guys, and I’m hoping to prototype a polyiso foam/ferrocement later this year. I think there’s an excellent chance that a really simple approach – chamfer the edges of the boards, assemble with tape, wrap the outside with chickenwire, put wire/plastic ties through the foam to another layer of chickenwire on the inside, then brace the inside with wood while the outside is sprayed with concrete, let it cure then spray the inside – has the potential to produce a cheap, permanent, fully insulated hexayurt. Add an insulated concrete slab and we’d be in business.

Also, I just want to note that the Burning Man hexayurt business is ramping up. Lots of different companies offering “hexayurt tape” (yes, they call it that), people beginning to trade hexayurts they don’t need any more, and talk of community mass production and a few made-for-sale units too. I’m very glad to see all of this, and as long as we can keep the business side civil, friendly, honest and fair, I could not be more glad to see this happening. Linux needs Red Hat to make it accessible for non-hackers, and we all need quality building materials at fair prices. Good work, guys, and I hope there will be some jobs coming out of the hexayurt ecosystem in years to come.

Enjoy!

by Jon Arden

I’m going to stop posting a lot of stuff here over time. The Hexayurt was invented in 2002, and it’s very close to being at the point where it’s beyond me to push it further into the world than the people who’re getting interested in the project now can take it. The work on infrastructure and politics themselves – the core topics of the leashless manifesto – have the juicy unsolved problems.

It’s a hut. Cardboard, plastic, wood, you can make it out of anything. With tape or hinges or just bolts and screws. With tarps or paint or rolled roofing, or nothing at all, it becomes waterproof. With reflectex it becomes warm. Add little appliances and utilities to taste.

The reason that, seven years after inventing the Hexayurt, not a single one has been deployed in a real crisis is because innovation not driven by substantial capital has a hard time penetrating the bureaucratic obstacles presented by established NGOs to protect their beneficiaries. But people other than me are engaging with those issues, and my focus has shifted to the infrastructure around the building, and the politics around the infrastructure, the building, and the problem itself.

Here’s the “stack”

Science

Technology

Politics

Strategy

Tactics

I’ve done a ton of work on technology, and now I’m beginning to feel the pull towards politics. Bottom line is that we need to do a lot better than we’ve been doing at allocating planetary resources where they are needed, at taking care of people and the world’s problems. I’ve pushed on the technical side hard enough to know that it is all possible but I’ve also discovered that without a fundamental change in our perception of what is important, even though it is possible it is not going to get done.

leashless is the start of a new phase, where I’m willing to step beyond Buckminster Fuller’s admonitions to stay out of politics, and into Gandhi’s universe of politics and spirituality as a single act.

I am leashless. Are you?

Solar funnel from Jonathan Sanderson on Vimeo.

Thank’s so much to Jonathan Sanderson and Elin for making the film. The Giant Solar Funnel is a solar funnel solar cooker than is very powerful, safe, and can be made in a few minutes from a big sheet of cardboard or corrugated plastic using just tape, glue and tinfoil.

Give it a try, let me know your results!

http://bit.ly/scim2 has the original PDF.

This tool is under an open license, and I’m very interested in taking on consulting clients who want to deploy and develop plans for their own organizations based on these two key scenarios: pandemic flu and infrastructure-related problems in a prolonged recession. Am based in London, but I get around.

Please pass the tool on, and feel free to put me in touch with potential clients.

Feel that earthquake today, SoCal? In California, we know how to roll — and how to shake and rattle, too. We’ve got five iPhone applications to help you get the details when your nerves are shaken by a quake — or to check in with that nutty West Coast relative as you sit safely tucked away in hurricane country.

The LA Times on iPhone apps for earthquakes

When the ground stops rumbling and the car alarms start screeching, we tend to grab our phones. For many of you, that happens to be an iPhone. So we’re weighing in with a special edition of Appiphilia to give you four apps that might assist you in an emergency situation.

The LA Times on iPhone apps for disasters

Note the first aid applications in the second piece.

Compare to the hexayurt mass evacuation plan which is visualized as using a phone app, or the phone based health insurance for $10 a year plan. The technology is catching up to the vision!

Very exciting!

(SketchUp & other files)

The Tribike is an attempt to create a “hexayurt for transport” – something minimally functional that can be made with common parts. The core idea is to use a tetrahedron as the basic form – the most minimal shape for enclosing space, and one of the strongest. Steel tube would be an obvious fabrication choice. A wheel is added at each corner.

Inside of the tetrahedron, a seat is suspended. It hangs inside of the frame, rather than being directly joined to it. For strength, the seat has multi-point attachments to the corners of the frame so that it cannot rotate in space or shift forwards or backwards. However, if the frame sustains a shock, flexibility in the steel frame and in the seat cables will cushion the impact. Clearly a seatbelt is required for riding in the tribike!

In the event of a crash, the frame will sustain the impact of an oncoming vehicle. The frame struts protect the occupants. In the event of a roll-over, people remain inside the interior volume of the tetrahedron, keeping them safe.

For the drive train, there are two basic approaches: two independent motors on the rear wheels, for tank-style steering, or a front wheel assembly which rotates and has the motor attached. There are benefits to both approaches, but for sheer simplicity, tank-style steering is to be preferred.

The entire assembly can be made to fold. If the three bottom bars of the frame are hinged, the entire vehicle can fold nearly flat, depending on the construction of the seat. If the seat is mainly made of tension elements, so that the frame stretches the seat out to make it strong enough to sit on, then the entire thing should go into a vertical stack about 3m high with a 1m square footprint.

Another approach is to have four “connectors” – the four points of the tetrahedron – containing all the welded components and mechanicals. The tubes which form the frame slot into these connectors, and are removable, so that they can be taken off for storage, packing the whole tribike down into six tubes plus three wheel assemblies, a chair, and the roof point. This approach is probably a lot easier to manufacture than a complete folding version, but would require some work when the tribike was being reassembled.

For weatherproofing, a canopy could be added over the seat, or possibly over the tribike as a whole. A floor for carrying cargo, or cargo nets, could also be added.

Right now the tribike is only an idea, but I would not be surprised if we take a shot at making some prototypes over the summer. Interestingly, Marcin Jakubowski and I both came up with more or less this exact design independently. The same basic conclusions came from the same basic knowledgebase about the tetrahedron as a fundamental structure, and the widespread availability of strong, cheap tubes.

http://hexayurt.com/tribike is the canonical URL for this project.

PS: I forgot to mention bamboo as a promising tube material. Thanks to Lucas for the reminder!

(thanks for the pic, Jonathan)

At the Maker Faire Newcastle, we made a new kind of Solar Funnel solar cooker. The design is very simple but very effective: take a 4×8 sheet of thin corrugated plastic (2mm is probably ideal, we used a light grade of 4mm) and cover one side with ordinary tinfoil using glue.

Roll it up into a cone, with about a 45 degree angle, tape into place, and cook. Even in Newcastle in March we got a probe up to 97C and would almost certainly have boiled water if the sun hadn’t gone in.

Here is a picture of the solar funnel that shows the shape better, and two more.

In terms of power output, it has roughly 1 square meter of collection surface, maybe a little more, so it’s got a maximum output of about 1kw – not bad, that’s about 2/3 of a domestic kettle. In practice expect about half that output in the UK – still very workable.

Cost, in mass production, would probably be two or three dollars a unit. But it needs some kind of stand to keep it pointed at the sun – probably as simple as a wire curve that one pushes into the ground. I think this has some potential.

Here is an MP3 audio version of the talk. Here are the slides. They ask the questions that the talk attempts to answer.

Here are the 10 questions we addressed.

1. What is Poverty?

2. How can Open Hardware help?

3. CAN THIS SCALE?

4. Global Ecological and Macroeconomic Constraints

5. Network Availability

6. Documentation and Translation

7. Eating our own dogfood

8. Identifying the developer community

9. Funding, funding, funding

10. The shape of the future world

There were three bonus slides

A. Is there human dignity?

B. Barbarism, Stasis and Ultratechnology

C. Living in a six+ billion people world

I think you’ll really enjoy this talk.