the arts of survival

I think this subjects cool. In a past blog I moaned a little about panic buttons and how designers making objects and products in the event of an emergency can cause people to panic even more, this I guess is along the same lines in the respect that designers are developing “just in case items”. But a lot of these items are being designed for people that may have lost a home due to a natural disaster or those that are on the streets, so this is a subject that is clearly evident in today’s society and is something that is happening.

The transportable hobo homes that we saw in Jennifer’s last lesson I feel are a little bit of a lost cause, yes they serve a purpose, but what is stopping one homeless person stealing another homeless persons home, at least when they salvaged cardboard boxes they were recyclable, easy to dispose of and weren’t simply receiving a handout from the government.

Also I feel it is really important that emergency housing and shelter is built for the environment that the disaster is in, for example in brazil they make their shanty’s out of recycled items and anything they can use around them already in their environment to use as housing. Another excellent example of this site situation housing is Pallet-housing designed by Azin Valy and Suzan Wines for returning refugees in Kosovo. This consists of modular transitional housing constructed from pallets, “but how did those pallets get there?” I hear you ask. Due to aid delivering goods in areas of devastation, medicine, clothes and materials get delivered on such pallets enabling everything delivered being used to help the effort of housing those left homeless. The housing has a lifetime of around 5 years which is the time it would take for a family to rebuild their house out of stone.

The life expectancy is also very important on temporary housing not only to give the occupants an idea of how long they have until they have to re-build but to make them re-build, I know it’s a bit of a cheesy saying, “only help those that help themselves” but I consider it to be very important as there is a thin line between graciously taking someone’s help and taking the piss.



Another example of site specific housing if not temporary is container units. Merchandise gets shipped around the world in those massive containers you see being transported by trains, boats and lorries which means they already have the means to ship mass quantities of the stuff and they are cheap as they just clutter up ship yards and such. This is a method many designers have taken on and are using to make homes out of today, why cant they send these (already built houses) to devastated areas?

This is an interesting subject and is defiantly important, id like to have somewhere to live if some disaster happened in my area and left me homeless and the futures for this subject are challenging as we cant predict where it will happen and on what scale, leaving a lot of room for a designer to solve a pressing issue and have fun.