Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Huma

About Architecture for Humanity
About Architecture for Humanity

Architecture for Humanity is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization founded in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises. Through competitions, workshops, educational forums, partnerships with aid organizations and other activities, Architecture for Humanity creates opportunities for architects and designers from around the world to help communities in need. We believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable and collaborative design can make a difference.

The organization is currently providing design services and funding for reconstruction in India and Sri Lanka following the devastating tsunami that struck South-East Asia in December 2004 as well as on the Gulf Coast of the United States after Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to implementing design initiatives and competitions, Architecture for Humanity supports humanitarian-directed design through advocacy. To that end, we have consulted with government bodies and relief organizations on a number of projects, including mine clearance programs and playground building in the Balkans; earthquake resistant construction techniques in Turkey and Iran; school building in Calcutta; refugee housing on the borders of Afghanistan and responding to Hurricane Ivan, Emily and Katrina. We have also provided referrals and advice to a number of organizations, including Oprah's Angel Network, African Regional Youth Initiative, Kansas City Economic Development Corporation, Kids With Cameras, Habitat for Humanity, Common Ground, UN Habitat, and others.
Finally, through exhibitions, media attention, conferences and forums, we foster public appreciation for the many ways that architecture and design can improve lives.

Educational Workshops
At the university level, architecture and design programs around the world have used our competitions and design criteria as a model for semester-long projects. In addition we have hosted student-led workshops focused on humanitarian-directed design at a number of universities. Elementary and high school students have also benefited from our design initiatives through after-school workshops.

Team Members
At the heart of Architecture for Humanity is a core group of people who have generously donated their time and efforts to keep AFH running. With advocates around the world Architecture for Humanity is truly becoming a global organization that encourages designers to make a difference.


MAIN OFFICE :
Executive Director/Co-founder: Cameron Sinclair (bio | where is Cameron?)
Managing Director/Co-founder: Kate Stohr (bio)
Office Manager: Beth Orser
Programs Manager: Stacy Sabraw
Programs Manager: Nathaniel Corum
Web Director: Lynn Standafer
Associate Programs Manager: Sola Morrissey
Bookkeeper: Ruthanne Martin
Interns: Morgan Boyles, Justin Green, Suzanne Hampton, Stacy Jed, and Megan McCall

GULF COAST:
Gulf Coast Develoment Director:Sherry-Lea Bloodworth
Program Manager: Michael Grote

Design Fellows:
India: Purmina McCutcheon
Sri Lanka: Susi Jane Platt
New Orleans: Eric Cesal


General Counsel: Steven Meier
Chief Financial Officer: Nicholas Constantakis
Media Relations: Galloway Media Group

AFH Advisory Board

We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization led by a board of directors and an advisory board which is replaced every two years. With each project, additional advisory board members are assembled based their individual areas of expertise. View Advisory Board Members

Local Groups

Over the last two years groups have sprung up around the world to lend their time and talents to community groups and advocate for better planning and design in their communities. Using this model over 2600 designers meet regularly to discuss and participate in design projects. Active groups are based in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Belfast, Chattanooga, Chicago, Dublin, Fargo, Houston, Iowa, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, St.Louis, Sydney, Tampa, Toronto, and Washington DC.

Press Inquiries?

We love talking about what we do. Our community partners and the designers who volunteer with us also love talking to the press. In fact, there are a lot of designers and partners who work with Architecture for Humanity. No surprise, we get a good number of press inquiries. So, in order to accommodate your request as quickly as possible, we've come up with a system: Read our press guidelines.

Design Within Reach: Architecture for Humanity
Design Within Reach: Architecture for Humanity Builds the Future of Housing
Jeff Muckensturm Assignment Zero
07.10.07

Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing." Assignment Zero produced 80 stories, essays and interviews about crowdsourcing; we'll reprint 12 of the best. The stories appear here exactly as Assignment Zero produced them. They have not been edited for facts or style.

Reported by Jeff Muckensturm, Alex Padalka, Suzanne Batchelor and Scott Mattoon
Written by Jeff Muckensturm
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Lisa Selin Davis

Architecture for Humanity has a clear goal: to improve the lives of billions people worldwide, one sustainable building at a time. And while the mission may sound overly ambitious, AFH is on its way. The group, which has become the premier nonprofit organization for disaster relief housing programs, has already helped build earthquake-resistant shelters in Turkey, refugee housing in Afghanistan, and school buildings in Calcutta.

AFH's success, however, can be bittersweet. After 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami, donations began pouring in, transforming something co-founder Cameron Sinclair, a San Francisco-based architect, started in 1999 during his spare time into a multi-million dollar organization. "Every time we've had a natural disaster, we gain another thousand people," Sinclair says.

Success also grew a problem: "People were writing about AFH, and how pioneering we were," says Sinclair, 33. "But behind the scenes we were frustrated because we had projects in eight different countries, we had architects working on similar issues, but nobody could share knowledge."

Then in 2006, AFH won the prestigious TED Prize?-which grants recipients a wish to help save the world. Sinclair was already brewing a pioneering idea. "I knew what we wanted to do... build a global, open source network where architects, governments, and nongovernmental organizations can share and implement design plans to house the world..." he said. "One solution is, let's just make the same chicken coop box and replicate it, stick vinyl siding on it and make people live in it... On the other hand, we can empower communities to come up with their own designs."

And the Open Architecture Network (OAN) was born.

The OAN web site?-an "online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design" -- allows architects to share their creations with other OAN members, resulting in the amassing of collective design knowledge from a crowd, otherwise known as crowdsourcing.

In the crowdsourced world of OAN, participants can swap, borrow, adapt, or adopt plans by uploading them. Each project is allotted up to 10 megabytes of space to upload a description, information, photos, and CAD files. The search and calendar functions allow visitors to find projects they're interested in by status (completed, in construction, design complete, design development), location, and theme (historic preservation, mixed use, flood resistant, etc.). Contributors uneasy with sharing their work can keep their projects private until they're ready to expose them to the world.

Even the software powering the site -- designed by Sun Microsystems -- is open source: the Drupal content management system chosen by thousands of nonprofits for its ease of use. "Sun Microsystems said, 'This needs to be sustainable, so if you're building an open source network, why not make the website open source itself?'" Sinclair told TreeHugger Radio. "So not only can architects contribute ideas, but computer architects can contribute revisions to the system."

When the site was unveiled in February 2007, more than 100 projects were uploaded. Today, over 3,700 volunteer designers working on about 217 different projects?-including designs for projects ranging from an orphanage in Sri Lanka to upgrades for the art space ABC No Rio in New York City -- are sharing their ideas with a rapidly expanding membership.

This kind of crowdsourcing implodes the trickle-down model of design, where architects are the experts, imposing their visions on the clients, and where developing nations rely on the West's expertise to solve their housing crises. The majority of OAN members are not from the U.S., according to Sinclair, and those from developing nations can share their expertise with others.

Sinclair calls this "leap back." "Leap back is when inventions are created in the developing world and we repurpose them in a first world setting," he says. So if an architect in Indonesia designs an innovative flood resistant structure, he or she could earn income by selling it to flood-prone areas of the U.S.

But why would architects -- sometimes portrayed as an egotistical lot -- give their designs away? Because, Sinclair said, the humanitarian element is missing from most design practices. "I'm sitting here designing hotel doorknobs when I could be doing something that actually made a difference in people's lives," he said. "We want to give stuff to the developing, to the poor, to the nonwestern world. We're not talking about a western solution."

Another draw to the site is that the OAN gives designers the opportunity to see their ideas actually get built. "Often designs go unrealized," said Kate Stohr, co-founder of AFH. "For a typical firm, something like eight or nine out of 10 projects never make it to construction."

And they don't have to surrender complete control of their designs to see them realized. OAN partnered with Creative Commons?-a nonprofit that helps change a copyright from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved" -- because Sinclair believes the "all or nothing" copyright system limits designers. "If I came up with a house design and I know there's a grave housing need in India, I'd want to be able to give it away because I can affect more people. But I don't want to give away my intellectual property away completely. So the some rights reserved are very relevant," he explained.

AFH was the first to license a building design -- a youth center/HIV clinic in South Africa--under Creative Commons, which has created seven licenses, used by all of the designs on the OAN, that range from "Public Domain" (free for nonprofit purposes) to "Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives" (can't be changed and requires attribution to the creator).

It also allows designers to alter design plans found on OAN to fit their specific needs, something that couldn't be done under normal copyright laws. "[Designers] can adapt projects to climatic differences, to the cultural differences, to the religious differences, to all the things that make a building what it is. It's about localization. It's not about projects made for modular replication, which usually fail cause they don't take into account localization," said Sinclair.

Projects can evolve and change into something the original designer may not have conceived, but still is credited for creating. "Your design idea lives on longer than you," said Sinclair. "It's not about who's living in my design now. It's about what are future generations doing with my design."

Take AFH's Biloxi Model Home Project, an emergency housing response to Hurricane Katrina. It includes housing designs sensitive to local needs and culture as well as input from the community that would eventually live in them. The project includes flood-resistant materials and building methods that could be adapted in other parts of the Gulf Coast, or other flood-prone areas around the world.

A form of crowdsourcing itself, the project -- a joint effort of the Biloxi Relief Recovery and Revitalization Center, the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio of Mississippi State University, and AFH -- invited 12 architects to submit designs for single-family homes that met FEMA's new building codes, including guidelines to lift all houses up to 12 feet off the ground. In August 2006, the participating designers traveled to Biloxi for an open house, where the community chose its favorites.

"What surprised me the most was the choices the families made in terms of design," said Stohr. "They were downright avant-garde." The Porchdog house, for example, includes a cantilevered deck roof with exposed joists and customizable interior.

Marlon Blackwell Architects designed the Porchdog house for the Tyler family -- headed by Richard Tyler, a house painter and single father of two. But once the design is complete, the plans, including CAD files, will be available on OAN for other communities, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, to use.

So far, the Porchdog house is the only one that has been replicated -- at least digitally. Clear Ink, a digital marketing company, found the Porchdog design on OAN, and asked Blackwell if they could create a 3D rendering of the plans in the online community Second Life. The result provides a sense of the finished home's scale and gives exposure to the project. Clear Ink also set up a virtual donation center to allow Second Life users to support the project; the money is real, even if the house isn't.

The real test of OAN's success is yet to come: Will designs be adopted and copied and shared in real life, too? Can it really make a dent in the living standards of five billion people, one in seven of whom live in slums?

Judging from the amount of buzz so far -- indicated by AFH's extensive donations and high-profile colleagues, like Oprah's Angel Network -- OAN's future looks promising. But convincing architects to share their work isn't easy. "It's going to be a slow push trying to convince architects and designers that this is a good place to put your work," said Sinclair.

Even those who have participated are a little fuzzy about its promise. "These are things I don't think a whole lot about. Maybe, it's kind of a generation thing," said Porchdog designer Marlon Blackwell. That sentiment, Sinclair said, is common among designers.

Still, Sinclair remains devoted to his organization's purpose and the promise of crowdsourced design. "There's no silver bullet for the future of housing or the future of structures," he told TreeHugger. "There are a hundred million solutions: We're trying to create a conduit that will allow that to happen."

How do you improve living standards of five billion people?
How do you improve the living standards of five billion people?

With 100 million solutions.
Your solutions.

Share and review 735 architectural projects
Access tools for managing your own projects
Collaborate with 7701 OAN members
Help build a sustainable future by sharing your knowledge

Photos and plans

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/